St Arc
by OldLady
Summary: An ex-slaver accidentally rescues a runaway Khajiit. Fortunately, someone's willing to pay for his safe return. Unfortunately, the Khajiit is all kinds of complicated, and intent on making her life difficult. Also, people are trying to kill them.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One: Hired**

This, she thought, watching a pair of drunken servants brawl half-heartedly over their house liveries (Hlaalu and Indoril, by the looks of it) _this_ is what it's come to. Sitting in the scummiest dive Balmora had to offer, Trask curled her fingers around a misshapen mug and stared irritably into the bitter depths.

At the other end of the bar, a group of her fellow Dumner struck up a chorus of some Bard's leavings. No very talented minstrel. Any musician worth his trade had likely managed to sing himself off the island by now.

Trask listened to the ill-formed verses, and her mood darkened with every clumsy line.

"The Devil's dead, 'e's down in flame,"

Imperial scum'll get the same,

Don't need Divine to Intervene-

Here's to the Nerevarine!"

Nerevarine, eh? Already these fools had him up there on a level with Vivec, although Vivec wasn't quite so high-and-mighty anymore. Trask snorted, and chugged down the rest of her bitter draft. She'd drink to _that_, at least that was one favor the youth had done for her and her kind.

The kid- the boy, really. He'd survived against all the odds, including her, without ever knowing how.

_Hope that luck holds, boy,_ she thought bitterly. _You'd damn well better hope it does, because even your old man Klaus might not like a Nerevarine he can't control._

A voice, slurring through both intoxication and oversized incisors, snapped her out of her revery. The resident Khajiit, One-Eye, was holding court among a raucous company of pub-goers.

"...End the trade," he was saying, "Khajiit and filthy Argonian lizards, all go free."

"Damn Helseth," Trask murmured. Another upstart brat of a revolutionary, although mercifully less idealistic. She knew damned well, even if One-Eye did not, that morality had nothing whatsoever to do with Helseth's proclamation.

Power did.

And Power was a pull which Trask could understand far better than whatever arcane force had driven the enigmatic incarnate down his fated path.

Damned kid.

Damned king.

"Damned cat," she added out loud, for good measure. Then she raised her voice and said it again. "Damned cat!" Trask got to her feet, clumsily knocking over the bar stool. "Filthy feline. Go home and drink your sugar-milk, One-Eye."

A hush fell throughout the room. Someone cheered. Someone else called her an n'wah, and then sat back with their mazte to enjoy the show.

One-Eye's ears fluttered in her direction, and he swiveled around to look at her with an eye which attempted to blink away his intoxication. Survival instincts twitched, but not hard enough.

"Nnnn- Kahjit no have to listen to dark elves anymore," One-Eye proclaimed, narrow chest inflating like a blowfish.

A slow grin crawled across Trask's face. She walked towards him slowly, every step careful and deliberate, until One-Eye had backed away into the counter. Then he saw the knife, a wicked razor of a weapon angle forward like some bizarre claw. He got a much closer look then he wanted, right before the blade came to rest against his cheek. It moved there, tapping lightly, grazing the fur directly below his one good eye.

Other patrons were staring, now- she'd gone entirely too far. Still, no one interceded.

"Kahjiit," Trask said, very softly, "are filthy, uneducated swine who'd let their mewling kittens starve before they'd do an honest day's work." The knife traced sideways, and a few strands of hair fluttered to the floor. "Repeat after me. Say it."

"Swine," babbled the poor Khajiit, too used to cowering to change his habits now, especially with the knife threatening his single remaining eye. "Filthy."

"True, and true." Trask slipped her free hand into a pocket of her coat. Then she brought it out again, and clasped the trembling cat's shoulder in an act of pseudo-friendliness. One-Eye convulsed, his lips forming a soundless scream. Trask let go, shaking her hand a little to dislodge a small clump of fur, and slid her hand back into her pocket. No one noticed her dark fingers flexing their way back into the skin-colored glove.

The cat stumbled aside and toppled to the floor, eyes unfocused. He hiccuped gently. The barkeep seized on the opportunity to remove a mess before it happened.

"I think you've had enough, cat," he said, seizing One-Eye by the arm and dragging him towards the exit. If the crazy knife-woman wanted to get blood all over the place, let her do it outside. That way, he wouldn't have to spend half the night scrubbing the floorboards and answering dangerous questions from unfriendly guards.

But Trask had already lost interest. She released the summoned knife and turned her back on the barkeep and his exceptionally intoxicated patron, apparently interested in nothing except the next mug of greef.

Looking towards her abandoned stool, she caught the gaze of the person who'd taken up a place beside it. A Dunmer, dressed conservatively but still clothed too finely for this dump. Clean, too. Her eyes narrowed, feigning offense at his faint smile.

Trask tripped back to her stool and kicked it back into position before falling onto it, exaggerating every clumsy motion.

"You looking at something, silk-shirt?" she growled. The man held up his hands, smiling even wider. His brows drew up in center when he did that, the outer edges angling down towards his abnormally blunt ears.

"Peace," he said, raised hands offering reconciliation, "I was only admiring a bit of deft knife-work. You're quite talented."

Trask shrugged, and reclaimed her seat. Was that soap she smelled? Sload. _Scented. _

"I suppose," she acknowledged.

_Damned straight. _She'd fought alongside _the_ Nerevarine, hadn't she? Never mind that the kid handled his sword as if it were a stick, and he some brat in a field fighting with imaginary foes. A mage, not a warrior, although the bards were telling different tales. Proper song-Heroes wielded proper swords, not magic. And they knew which end was which, too.

The stranger waved down the barkeep and ordered a drink of his own. Trying to fit in- and failing. One glance into the depths of his poorly-formed mug, one queasy thought of cleanliness passing perceptibly across his fastidious features, and he set the mazte aside.

"Former slaver, eh?" he asked, causally.

Trask shrugged again, and stole his drink. He didn't object.

"No secret. What's it to you?" she asked, a little more inclined to talk now that he'd bought her a drink. Kind of.

"I'd imagine you're out of work." To put it mildly, yes. "...And I happen to have some work that needs doing..." he stopped, looking sideways at her, waiting for a reaction. She didn't give him one, just stared stonily at the counter-top.

"Well." the elf said, when the pause became awkward. He cleared his throat. "Some of your, um... former colleagues... aren't taking the news so well. Smugglers, you understand. Illegal. Illegal means bounties."

"Forget it." Trask took another swig of Mazte. "Bounty-hunting's a short-term career, and it pays dung."

"Ten-thousand gold," the elf contradicted her. Trask froze. Then she sat the mug back down on the table, very, very gently.

"Who?"

The elf looked sideways at her and hesitated.

"Calls himself Grief," he answered, after a second's thought. "...you know him?"

Trask grinned, slow, and wide, and evil.

"Twenty-thousand," she said, "And you'd better be good for it."

"Fifteen."

"Done."

* * *

Zahn watched the flickering torches, and tried to think about more than his misery. His discomfort began somewhere in his wet hind-feet and ended in the lump on his skull, with all manner of bruises and scrapes filling the space in between.

They'd taken his clothes straight away (no need wasting fine linen in this muddy pit, and his had been very fine indeed) and Zahn had instantly become, as far as the slavers were concerned, completely indistinguishable from the other captives. Elves often had a hard time telling Khajit apart. Since their favorite form of address seemed to be "_Hey, you!" _Zahn supposed that they didn't really need to.

Except that, in his case, they wanted to.

"A Khajit wearing fancy clothes and wandering around alone-"

"-The aristo-cat, Grief wants to see him."

"Which one is 'e?"

Zahn tried to mill with the rest, looking as forlornly disinterested and un-aristocratic as possible. It nearly worked. Nearly.

But- "Hey, you!" said one of the thugs. Zahn looked up directly into a pair of bright red eyes.

"Um... me?" And they had him.

* * *

Trask cupped the light-spell between her palms, and knelt down to examine the stone overhang. Dark, murky water of indeterminate depths, fed by a waterfall and following its own current to hell only knew where.

Dangerous, easy to get drawn under and trapped in an airless tunnel, if one couldn't fight the current. Easy to go too far, and miscalculate the time needed for a return journey.

A body could get swept away and lost forever, drowned and devoured by carrion-feeders who would remember the feast of flesh for the rest of their savage, sightless lives.

Trask smiled. Devious bastard.

_Which_ devious bastard, now, that was a question worth asking.

_Don't underestimate me, silk-shirt._

If this were a trap, it had better be a good one.

She let the light-spell go, and her wry grin was lost in an absolute dark.

* * *

"You talk... oddly, for a Khajiit. Which is to say, you sound normal. Why?"

Zahn stood ill-at-ease, trying not to look into the elf's amiable, dull-red eyes. One was glazed over in blindness. The Dunmer's face was a veritable butcher-shop job of scarred lacerations. A few teeth were missing, and every finger of his visible hand seemed to have been broken at some point in his obviously long life.

On the whole, Zahn thought, he looked entirely too convincingly villainous to be for real.

Only the elf's voice remained intact. It was clearly enunciated and perversely polite, with an edge which assured the Khajiit that this man was quite real, quite definitely a villain, and entirely capable of proving that in a variety of unpleasant ways.

"I spend a lot of time with elves and humans," Zahn responded truthfully, prompted by a guard's rough push.

"Oh?" the scarred Dunmer toyed with an amulet hanging around his neck. It looked like a fang.

Possibly a Khajiit fang. "picked up the accent, have you?"

Zahn swallowed, watching those dark, crooked fingers play with the grisly token.

"Well... yes."

The elf caught his stare, and smiled pleasantly.

"Like my necklace?" he lifted it, let it dangle on a length of leather cord. "you don't need to worry, my dear aristocat. I only do this to cats who bite. You won't bite, will you?"

Zahn shook his head.

"There, then. I'm sure we'll get along fine."

He dropped the necklace and picked up a crumpled fold of cloth, holding it out tantalizingly like a boy teasing a dog with a treat. "Want some sugar, my friend?"

Zahn could catch the scent even from where he stood, the sickly-sweet odor known to drive so many of his species to distraction. It affected him, too, a shiver that went to his bones. Khajiit were born addicts, inheriting the need from their dependent mothers. Saxtus had told him that.

Zahn bared his teeth in a nervous smile, and shook his head at the offer.

"No... thank you." Red eyes stared at him.

"No? No. My. You are an aristocat, aren't you? You don't care for the sugar?" Zahn's stomach turned decidedly queasy at the look in the elf's eye.

"No," Zahn said. The elf arched an eyebrow, prompting the Khajiit to continue.

"Um... it's... it makes people really stupid. Like drunk, except worse." For a moment longer, the elf merely stared. Then he smiled, a wry twist of closed lips, and turned to address the elves on either side of Zahn.

"Hear that, boys? Might want to lay off it for a while." Zahn's ears flattened in consternation.

_Oh._

But then the elf kept talking, and he soon forgot all about his little indisgression.

"Fine clothes, fine speech. No sugar." Grief still smiled but he'd replaced the aura of genuine friendliness with an aura of genuine menace. "I want you to tell me who you are, and who might pay to have you back."

Meeting those mismatched eyes, Zahn encountered a very clear and entirely bilaterally symmetric intonation.

"_I am perfectly capable,"_ that look said, "_of feeding you your own guts and adding both of your dainty white fangs to my little collection," _This elf was very serious. And this elf, at least, would have no trouble picking him out from a crowd.

So Zahn told him why he talked like an Imperial.

Five seconds later, he was very much wishing that he had not.

"Ransom?" asked one of the guards, looking at his boss. The scarred visage remained impassive for a moment longer, then the Dunmer shook his head.

"No," he said, "too risky. Better just kill him."

**TBC**


	2. Chapter 2

"It's traditional," Grief said, "for a condemned man to have a last meal. The Imperials insist on it. Did you know that, cat?" Zahn swallowed hard, looking for his voice. Food was the last thing on his mind.

"Yes," he said. Grief laughed.

"You would, wouldn't you? Guess you've seen plenty of criminals drop."

Zahn said nothing, flexing his claws and trying to test the ropes around his wrists. -Claws, now, there was a joke. They were only dulled little stubs, because: "_Civilized Khajiit do _not _scratch."_ He swore that if he ever got out of this alive he'd grow them out longer and sharper than those of the fabled Senche-raht.

"Now, now," Grief smirked, and lightly kicked at the captive's dusty hind-feet. "I'm trying to be friendly, here. Don't you know that the longer you keep me interested, the longer you live? -And I _am_ interested. You're a very unique case, young Zahn."

_N'wah. _

Zahn glanced around. Several of the dunmer's lackies lounged about nearby, sitting on crates or leaned up against the stone walls. Some watched with stony indifference, others smirked and snickered at the Khajiit's predicament.

Grief simply sat on a barrel beside the bound captive, sharpening his knife and chatting amiably. He paused for a second and tested the blade, then shook his head and went back to sharpening. Zahn's heart made up for several missed beats.

Zahn redoubled his surreptitious efforts to break free. Probably wasted effort, but so long as he could play the fool, keep himself thinking that there might be some way out of this, then he could at least prevent himself from having a complete break-down and losing whatever dignity he had left.

_Shrik, shrik,_ went the knife, every time Grief ran the whetstone along its edge. Zahn couldn't make himself look anywhere else.

"Must have been an interesting life, eh?"

"...No."

_Shrik, Shrik._

No, it hadn't been, and he'd been trying for an improvement (the kind he could survive, not this kind), and that was one of a hundred perfectly good reasons why he did not want to die right now.

The dunmer paused for a second, held the stone aside and pointed the blade's tip directly at Zahn's neck.

"Used to have a cat working for me, you know. While back. Tawny runt, sweet little thing by the name of Issih. Good girl." He smiled his pleasant, grandfatherly smile. "She could bring in the big boys like nothing else."

"What... what happened to her?" Zahn didn't quite understand what Grief was alluding to. A khajiit, work for slavers? It didn't make sense. Grief shrugged, and went back to sharpening his knife. Slow and steady, always in the same direction.

"Well," he said, "girls, now, girls can be a bit silly sometimes. Went and got all sentimental over some mark, started jabbering on about how they were soulmates, or something. Tried to elope with the boy." The blade flashed silver as the slaver angled it to the light, letting his eyes linger appreciatively on the edge. "Couldn't have that, now could I? But you- you seem like a sharp lad. Bit inexperienced, maybe, but well-educated. Not some slip of a soft-hearted girl."

The pieces began to fall into place.

"She... she betrayed other Khajiit? To you?"

"And did a fine job of it," Grief cheerfully affirmed, winking at him. "So what do you say, my fine young lad? A slit throat, or a fine job here with us. Your choice."

"I-" Zahn began, then bit back the bile in his throat and took a second to think. Shout defiance and die a martyre's death? Nope, not this Khajiit, not today. He'd say anything they wanted, and first chance he had he'd make a break for it, straight into the arms of the law, and let Helseth's reform deal with these demons.

"Of course," Grief continued, eyes twinkling merrily, "we have to be sure of you. There's a little something we need you to do, just to make sure you've got the necessary... well... that you've got what's necessary."

_The necessary lack of a heart?_

"Aye, Meril!" Grief shouted. One of the lounging elves shifted position and stood up straight.

"Yessir?" he asked.

"Go to the pits and fetch the most miserable excuse of a feline you can find."

"Yessir," the elf confirmed, grinning, and went vaulting over the wooden fencing down to where the slaves were kept. A few tense moments later and he came back again, dragging along with him one of the most pathetic things Zahn had ever seen.

The Khajiit kept her eyes on the floor. Long, ragged hair covered most of her face, but he could tell that she couldn't have been more than twelve. Barely a woman, by Khajiit standards, and not a woman at all by Zahn's. Just a kid. Every rib showed out in sharp relief under a too-thin coat of dust-brown fur, and her arms and legs seemed reduced to tendons and joints. She could barely even stand on her own.

_Bad feeling about this, _Zahn tensed, looking from the malnourished child to his captor. _Bad, bad, bad feeling about this. _Grief smiled and gestured to the emaciated creature like she was a freak on exhibit.

"Slaves get like this sometimes," he said, conversationally. "Just- refuse to keep living. Not much good to me, as you might imagine. Who'd want to buy that?" The Slaver stood and walked to where Zahn sat, tied to a stake. The Khajiit tried to look up, but couldn't crane his neck far enough to see past the elf's belt-buckle.

Grief walked around behind him, back where Zahn couldn't see any part of him at all, and a second later the ropes at his wrists fell away. Then he felt something cold pressed into his hands, and he gripped the thing reflexively even though his fingers were nearly too numb to feel it.

He brought it around, held it up in front of his eyes, and saw that he was holding the knife.

"Why?" he asked, holding the thing as warily as he would have held a serpent. Grief stood in front of him again, hand outstretched and pointing at the bound and gagged creature who still lay helpless on the floor.

Zahn scrambled to his feet and backed away, knife held out in front of him. Straight out, as far as he could keep it from himself without dropping it.

"A-as if!" his back bumped into the wall, and Grief began to laugh.

"My, my- you are unique, cat. Quite unique." He moved to stand over the emaciated slave, stirring the form with his foot. Blank yellow eyes looked up at him, then closed when the girl tried to curl into a tighter ball. "Now, what about this one?" the Slaver asked. "Is she as unique as you? If your positions were reversed, would she act like an honorable little lady, and refrain from slitting your throat?"

Zahn swallowed. "I hope so," he said, honestly. He watched Grief kneel, gently run a caressing hand over the slave's mangy fur. The slaver's fingers slid under the girl's chin, forced her head up and towards Zahn.

"Look at her, cat. Just look. How long do you think she'll live? A few days, maybe a week?" he let her head fall back to the stone with an audible smack. "Whereas you- you've got decades in you. One life for the other, it's not even an equal trade." That gentle, cajoling, _reasonable_ voice still filtered out through a pleasant smile. Devils looked like that when they talked, all level-headed logic and twisted half-truths.

Zahn shook his head stubbornly. "I don't think it works like that."

Grief stared. at him impassively, his lips crooked in the corruption of an honest smile.

"Why not?" he asked, gently. Zahn looked down at the knife in his hand, then up at the Dunmer's unruffled countenance. He couldn't connect this situation to the slaver's relaxed stance and self-assured rationality. "Bec- because you can't measure life. It isn't like coin."

Zahn darted forward. Rushing past Grief and falling to his knees beside the young Khajiit, he hurriedly cut the cords around her wrist. They fell away easily, but the girl didn't move. Didn't stir, didn't look at him. What was this? None of the elves had moved, and no one yelled or swore or made move to stop him. Behind him, he heard Grief sigh.

"Such emotional creatures." There was real regret in the elf's voice. Zahn felt a hand fall to his shoulder, and was momentarily taken aback by what felt like a sympathetic gesture. He doubted that conception, doubted it very much. But no amount of well-placed misgiving could have prepared him for what happened next.

With no further warning, something closed around his neck. Something heavy in a way which transcended physical properties, a cold, metallic presence that pressed against his mind as well as his skin. Within the space of a breath, his entire world darkened to gray.

"I'd of given you the right to choose, boy," Grief's voice resounded through his skull, no longer confined to a single dimension. _Inside_ him, not filtering in through his senses but pushing against them from the other side. "Only, you chose wrong."

Zahn gasped, and doubled over. He'd been drunk, once, very drunk. A dare, and a barrel of Cook's best, and an unhealthy dose of natural curiosity... the morning's regret had been nothing compared to Saxtus's displeasure, but it was the hangover that he remembered most. Zahn commonly disappointed Saxtus. But that peculiar pain had been very, very new, and not the sort of experience which he ever intended to repeat.

Take the discomfort. Multiply it by ten. And add a plentiful measure of sheer, unadulterated, intelligently willful malice...

Zahn couldn't think. Something was thinking, and using up a lot of space in his brain to do it, but it wasn't him.

The knife lay on the ground beside him where it had fallen. Zahn couldn't remember dropping it, but now he needed to pick it up, needed to, in a way which he couldn't remember needing anything before. At least, not anything attainable, not anything so close to his hand. His hand shuddered, each finger twitching spasmodically.

Distantly, he heard the laughter. The cavern was alive with it.

_No._

A distant but insistent voice cried out, shouting to be heard over the noise of the crowd- such a crowd, all in his head. And they all wanted the same thing. Only one of the voices, the voice that was hidden, wanted something different.

"_Go outside,"_ cook used to tell him, all bustle and exasperated resignation, _"silly kitten, don't give Ahnatti this look. Go outside."_ And all the while that night's dinner would be writhing pitifully in her hand, squeaking abjectly and fighting for all it was worth. A broken neck, that was how Ahnatti did it. Sometimes a severed one.

The blade scraped off the ground, coming upwards one tiny fraction at a time.

_No, no, no, no!_

The crowd in Zahn's mind converged on the single voice, drowned it. Suffocated it. He couldn't breathe. The world went dark before his eyes and he fell into some undefined space. He kept falling until his forehead hit stone, and the knife fell from an outstretched palm.

The stone- was wet. So was the knife. And his hand.

Warm, and wet.

**TBC**


	3. Chapter 3

Zahn's breaths came shallowly, and far too fast.

She was dead, unmistakably dead. Her face betrayed nothing else, not even a last grimace of pain. The young Khajiit folded in on himself, wrapping his arms over his stomach and dropping his head onto his knees, one tightly-folded ball of denial.

The pressure lessened around his mind, the crowd receded. They left him alone. Had they been real? Had they ever been? He'd _killed_ someone.

_He'd_ killed someone.

_"We only told you to. We only said to. You didn't have to listen."_

Something touched his hair, his ear. Gentle fingers, soothing and kind. Grief's faint smile was all gentle mockery and grandfatherly compassion.

"It's not your fault," he assured. "It wasn't something you could help. You had no control, cat. You couldn't stop it."

"My hands," Zahn said, voice barely audible. "blood..."

"Not your hands, cat." Grief said. His crooked fingers continued to stroke Zahn't hair, soothing out the tangles. "Mine. Your hands, your mind, and everything else that you are."

Zahn kept still. It didn't matter. How could it possibly matter now?

And then something important happened. Something insurmountably momentous, although Zahn could only know the half of it. Ovarin Grief, Vvardenfell native and rogue sorcerer with a hundred and fifty-eight bloodstained years behind his name, died.

* * *

"It's a rough life here, girl," he'd told her, his face still handsome back then. She had laughed, short, sharp, and bitter. The sound took wing and echoed around the cavern, drawing a few glances from the dunmer's crew. The young elf lifted her hand, and jerked a ring off her finger, the inset ruby glistening bright in the torchlight.

"Worried for me?" she said, voice harsh in her own ears. "Don't be. I'm not what you think." She made to toss the ring away from her, something which might well have resulted in a bloody massacre between hard-bitten thieves who'd of murdered their own mothers for less. But Grief reached out, quicker than thought, and plucked the thing out of the air.

"You've suffered a loss," he said, softly, his eyes as red as the ruby. "Do not throw away what you have left."

The youth clenched her teeth, biting down hard over the raw emotion which tried to well out of her. She forced the words through them.

"I have. Nothing. Left."

Grief was silent for a time. Then slowly, very slowly, he lay a hand against the round of her cheek. His fingers caressed, touched the knotted muscle of her jaw, traced the line of a long neck. Once she might have broken that hand, but now the touch was only a touch. Meaningless. Nothing could possibly matter now.

"Then become someone else," Grief told her. The ring had vanished, but she paid it no mind. She'd meant it to, and this way was as good as any other. "Become new. Be reborn." The dunmer's voice was rich and full, gentle and invasive, like the hand which still lay against her skin. "If the past pains you, then cut it away. Be free of it. I can show you how."

And in the weeks, months, and years which followed, he did exactly that. Until the day when he realized that she'd learned more than he'd ever intended for her. And that was the day she fell off a cliff with an arrow in her back and a river below.

For a few months after, Grief had difficulty sleeping. Possibly his conscience troubled him. Maybe he missed the warm body beside him at night, the restless sleeper who's troubled dreams had gradually subsided under his insinuative ministrations. Or perhaps it was a cold body he regretted- a stiff, dead corpse to put his mind at ease.

They never found her.

* * *

Zahn saw the slaver's last second, saw- far closer than he wished- how only the knife's hilt protruded from the Dunmer's single good eye. Zahn not only saw the elf die, he also felt it. The pressure in his mind grew cold as the superimposed will slipped away. Zahn felt Grief die, and it was a little like dying himself.

The elf toppled forward and fell across the khajiit's body. Zahn scrambled out from beneath the corpse, surprised and horrified at the dunmer's featherlight fragility. Grief had been built like a bird. But he wasn't half so frail as the figure lying beside them, all skin and fur and bones. Hard to believe she'd only died moments before. Impossible to believe any of this.

"E's dead!" said one of the slavers, his rasping voice tremulous "Dead. Look at him." No more laughing. The mass wasn't laughing anymore.

Saxtus had told a story like this, once, although he hadn't told it to Zahn. But Zahn had listened, and now the words came floating back to him, clarified by shock.

The story told of a General, a powerful warlord who was held to be in high favor with the heavens, a champion of the Nine themselves. It seemed as though wherever he went on the battlefield, some divine gift protected him from all harm. He'd carve through enemy lines as heedlessly as a berserk, and never received so much as a scratch. (Saxtus paused there to explained how absurd that was, and gave one of his lectures about discipline and formation and the folly of pursuing personal glory).

One day the General went riding the perimeter of a besieged fortress. It was a whim, a thing which armored patrols did every day under his subordinate's command. But that day he strayed too close to the keep's battlemented walls, and a sentry loosed a stray shot, not even knowing his target. The arrow struck home in the General's shoulder. Choosing to laugh off the relatively shallow injury, the General continued his ride. But the wound became infected, and in three days time he died. The man hailed as heaven's hero had been killed by one chance arrow from a bored sentry.

_"Anyone can die," _Saxtus concluded. Because those were the kinds of stories he told, and the sorts of conclusions he reached. No use at all to a young Khajiit who'd much rather be climbing trees in the orchard and chasing rats in the cellars than swinging a sword in the practice yard.

_Anyone can die._

"How?" asked one of the slavers. And with that, critical question, it finally occurred to the band that they might themselves be in danger. Faces wheeled to face the cavern's shadowy recesses. Weapons came out, and teeth were bared in near-feral snarls.

"Who's there?"

"Show yourself!"

"Come out, N'wah."

And, unexpectedly, a voice answered them back. "...If you insist."

She wasn't there, not before she was. One second an empty space, and the next the shape of a very wet dunmer woman. Water still streamed from her braided hair and ran in rivulets from the hem of her long, tattered coat. She held no weapon. Long fingered hands lifted, and began to wring the moisture out of her braided hair. "Some place, boys."

There were eight of them. Eight of them, and one of her. The odds didn't even seem to register. She smiled pleasantly. "I hope there's a back door."

The other elves simply stared. Then one, the one called Meril who'd brought the yellow-eyed slave from the pit, spoke. "Who are you?"

"Trask," said the woman.

"Why'd you just..." the Meril motioned towards Grief's body.

"Business." The elf strode forward. Stepping past Zahn as though he didn't exist, she reached down and grasped the knife's handle, giving it one good yank...

...And Zahn found out that the one sound worse than a blade going into someone was the sound of a blade coming out of them. He winced, eyes shying away.

"But he was our leader!" The youth looked more than a little lost. Not like they'd liked Grief, that wasn't the kind of thing people in this business did. Liking people definitely wasn't in the job description. But there had to be some kind of loyalty, didn't there?

No.

Grief had always figured that fear worked just as well, and it was cheaper, required less energy, and could be a whole lot more fun.

"Yes?" the assassin asked, politely.

"W-we can't just let you walk out of here!" the boy glanced from side to side, beseechingly, as though to ask "right?"

The assassin flicked blood off of her knife, still smiling. "That's not really the issue. The issue isn't whether or not you'll let me leave."

"Then what?"

"The issue is whether- or not- I'll let you leave. It could be inconvenient for me, letting you live. What do I get for it?"

The self-appointed spokesman stared at her. "But there's eight of us!"

The assassin's fingers flashed out, her knife held poised and centered below the wickedest grin Zahn had ever seen. "About to be seven."

"W-wait!" the boy hadn't bargained for this, and he certainly wasn't about to die for the memory of someone like Grief. "The khajiit!" He said, on a sudden inspiration, "take the khajiit!"

For the first time, the assassin looked directly at Zahn, who understood that he hadn't been a matter for consideration before that moment. No more than the rocks around them; just scenery. Meeting the bright red gaze, he wished that it could have stayed that way.

"And what would I want with some mangy stray?"

The youth told her.

For a moment, everything hung undecided. Then one of the slavers decided that life had gotten old.

The knife buried itself in the assailants throat before he'd made two paces. But there were four more behind him, and they came in a group. Four on one, and the one apparently disarmed while each of the four held a mismatched assortment of naked blades. No way to avoid them all, no way to possibly-

Zahn watched, but he didn't see. Whatever happened, it happened too quickly for his eyes to follow. One second the assassin stood stock-still before the oncoming attackers, and the next she seemed to blur, dissolving into thin air like an illusionist's puppet when the play was done.

Only one of her attackers was well-enough versed in spellcraft to understand. He was the only who didn't balk or look round to see where she'd gone. He kept his eyes narrowed on the place she had been and swung his sword in a wide, neck-level arc. The assassin suddenly reappeared, straightening from under the sword's sweep and driving an elbow deep into the swordsman's throat. He coughed, and she followed it with a flat-palmed blow to the face. Cartilage cracked, and the elf collapsed with blood streaming from the shattered remnants of his nose. The better part of it had been driven into his brain, killing him.

The three remaining converged on her. One fell back with a terrible scream, hands covering his eyes. One collapsed with both hands locked over his torso, in obvious pain. He hit the ground and twitched twice before falling permanently still. And the third- plunged his dagger deep into the assassin's ribs.

**TBC**


	4. Chapter 4

And that was the end of it. That _should_ have been the end of it

The slaver thought so too. He grinned in triumph, savagely twisting the dagger's hilt. The assassin moved, placing her bloodstained hand over his. Something cracked. The elf shuddered and convulsed, his grin gaped wide in astonishment, and he took two steps backwards. Then he fell. His own bloodstained weapon clattered to the ground beside him.

The assassin, Trask, stood for a second, the water which still dripped from her knee-length coat beginning to turn red. She kneeled, a concise, controlled motion, and reached out to the elf who still held his hands over his eyes. Her fingers touched his chest. Zahn watched the elf's entire body abruptly go rigid, and spasm as though in agony. Then he lay as still as the others.

"V-vampire." whispered the former spokeperson, Meril. He huddled against the cavern's far wall, arms held out in a warding gesture. The assassin stood up.

"You have it wrong," she said. Not defensive, not angry. A simple statement. "But believe what you want. I accept your offer."

It wasn't until she started towards him Zahn remembered "the offer" meant him.

"No." Zahn resisted, pulling back from the steely grip. He'd been kidnapped, abused, stripped, and forced to murder someone. There was courage- and then there was having nothing to loose. "Let go." He still couldn't think past the pressure in his head. It felt as though everything he was had been squeezed into a tiny cube and thrown into the deep ocean where even dreugh couldn't go. Everything pushed in on itself, cold and compressed. And then the cold flared red hot, and, for the second time, he wasn't alone.

_Not again, not this, not-_

The walls fell away. Zahn put fingers to his own neck, and stared at where the collar lay coiled like a snake on the ground. It felt like a walking into a sunny midday world after years trapped underground.

Beautiful. Glorious. _Painful. _

His eyes turned towards the body of the other slave. A small thing amidst all the carnage, certainly no account to anyone else. Tears welled up in his eyes, and Zahn made no attempt to blink them away.

"You didn't kill her." The assassin stood above him, arms folded. Her face stayed as compassionless as it had been when she'd denied being a vampire. Stating- simply stating.

Zahn stared up at her. "I- did. I know I did." he objected.

"That's the point." The assassin moved away, hunting for her knives. "Your knowing."

"But how-"

"Grief killed her, cat. When you blacked out." Zahn shook his head, and kept shaking it. "Why?"

"So that you'd know. Once you believe that collar works— that's when it begins to."

Zahn couldn't understand, not then. All he could do was reach across and close the slave's staring eyes.

* * *

His eyes had still been open, but they no longer bothered to blink away the rain. The wind-driven droplets had to sting, had to hurt- that thought crossed through her mind, before she realized that nothing would ever hurt him again. Not her, not her brother, not any of her family or the other servants.

The bolt in his back assured that. Her hand, shaking in the wake of her involuntary spell, and a contact terminated before completion, stole away her chance of denial.

She heard the scream before she felt it, the inhuman sound tearing out of her chest and cutting across the deck. A banshee's wail, stealing a beat from the heart of every sailor on board.

She lept into action, feet pounding across the deck in a straight line towards the shore, and the jetty, and the archers. The archers still fired, even though the ship had passed out of range and the arrows fell short. She reached for the rail, ready to vault it and dive into the roiling gray waves. Not thinking about the distance, or the archers, not thinking at all but only seeing their deaths, the deaths of everyone who might have been responsible.

Hands caught her, spun her around before she could dive headlong into her own death. She struck at him, ready to break anything in her path, but a backhanded blow caught her across the cheek and jarred her back to reality. The jetty vanished before she could twist around, gone into the mist. The ship raced across open waters, spelled to a speed unattainable by any natural means.

She'd raged, roared her defiance to the storm, and cursed every god she could remember. But the storm eventually exhausted itself, and so did she. The morning brought a gray sky and a flat trackless ocean. She stayed on the deck, bare-armed in the cold, her cloak wrapped around the bloodstained corpse. Only one man dared approach- the same man who'd stopped her the night before.

A man who told her what her companion hadn't had time to say. Explained the escape which the dead man had laid out for her, the future he'd procured.

A gift of life which he'd died to deliver.

* * *

"What's wrong with you?" Trask stared down at the Khajiit, who'd caught himself on the hatchframe and leaned there, an arm across his eyes.

"Too bright," he said, voice muffled.

"The sun will set soon. Wait inside."

"No." he stumbled forward, and nearly fell. Trask caught a hold of him, disgusted by the feel of wet fur and the smell of blood.

"Fool."

"Don't want to go back inside." Hard to tell through a khajiit accent, but Trask thought that his voice didn't sound quite right. Too quick, rasping, slurred. She curled a disgusted lip, and got a good grip on the creature's arm. So much effort.

If the reward wasn't worth it, then she'd have to find the talkative dunmer brat and skin him. He and the three other survivors had fled, leaving the four dead and taking the sole survivor along only as a belated afterthought.

_ "Take the trash with you,"_ she'd reminded them when they'd made to leave, and indicated the blinded elf's prone form.

"Damn cat," she said, now, and pulled him along. A little ways down the fyoda she selected a sheltered spot and deposited her burden within, out of the wind. He was shivering, and it would be inconvenient if the creature died on her.

A pile of brush and a quick spell soon had a healthy fire going. It burned away the smell of wet cat and cast a red glow into the deepening dusk which settled around them like the black ash of a spent storm. Throughout, the young khajiit never said a word. He simply sat, too close to the flames, a miserable huddle of long limbs and damp fur. His eyes watched the fire as though hypnotized.

Trask flicked a pebble at him. It bounced neatly off his nose, eliciting a start and a single, unguarded glance. His eyes skittered away, but not soon enough. Trask grinned. Well, good to see Grief hadn't finished his work in the youngster; it would have hurt her pride to know she was dealing in damaged goods. Her kind had to be careful of their reputations. In her line of work, everything came down to fame and infamy. But not too much of either, not for Trask. Trask couldn't afford to make a _real_ name for herself.

The cat was still functioning. Grief hadn't had him long enough to do irreversible damage.

"Cheer up, cat," she said, mockingly. "You're going home, aren't you?" The khajiit drew his knees in tighter, arms tightening defensively. "Don't take me back."

Trask chuckled. "Can you buy me out? No? Didn't think so."

"Please?" It came just like that, with a question mark on the end. Trask shook her head, a little incredulous. He sounded serious.

"This is money, cat. Business."

"I can't go back."

The assassin sighed. "Really. This the thanks I get for saving you? A little gratitude, boy."

"Thank you," said the khajiit, earnestly. He had large, liquid eyes, colored like dark honey. Trask found no trace of sarcasm in them, not that she had long to look. His head dipped forward slowly, coming to rest on crossed forearms. His body slid down until he lay curled on the fyoda floor. Asleep, just like that.

Trask watched for a while, waited until the creature's breath began to come smooth and regular. Merchandise, she reminded herself. A thing; a package. And the sooner she delivered it, the better.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Zahn stood in the whispering dark beneath the bridge's first arch. Cool- chilly. Too cold, uncomfortable to a body damp with sweat. He knew he was sick. Didn't want to go home, didn't want to tell Edeth, didn't want windows shuttered shut and nothing to drink but hot soup. Too many blankets. A blazing fire. Suffocation.

And _He'd_ be angry, He'd be so angry...

Zahn awoke. He was indeed wet, and damp, and cold. The fever had also followed him out of the dream. But he was not standing under the familiar arch, where great blocks of blue-gray stone came alive with liquid reflections from the river. Instead he lay beneath an open sky, his body one large network of bruises. His shoulder and hip hurt from a night on the stone, and his hand felt numb and tingled wretchedly when he tried to flex his fingers. He sat up, almost landing a paw in the charcoals of yesterdays fire. Yesterday, last night... it sat in his mind like the fuzzy impression of a half-remembered nightmare. Zahn couldn't remember the last time he'd been able to think straight. He figured he'd better get back in the habit soon.

Zahn's wandering gaze fell on the Dunmer, and the sight of her helped solidify the events of yesterday. She'd been a part of it- a big part.

He remembered the four attackers. Three had died. He remembered...

"_Vampire!" Zahn shuddered. That wasn't true. It wasn't true, was it? _

She'd said it wasn't.

Suddenly the dunmer's bright red eyes shot open, and caught his gaze head-on. His ears flattened in consternation and he turned away sharply.

_I wasn't staring, _he objected inwardly, before wondering if it mattered. The elf certainly didn't seem to think so. She sat forward, cracked her neck, and adjusted her gloves. Then, and only then, did she look back at him.

"Mornin,' cat," she acknowledged, almost pleasantly.

"Good morning," Zahn said, automatically civil. He'd thought he'd understood civility; he'd certainly learned more about manners than one head could ever hope to remember. But Grief had been civil. Grief had spoken properly and politely and still filled his words with meanings worse than any of the foul-mouthed urchins back home could possibly conceive.

This dunmer spoke differently than Grief. Her voice had a rough-edged lilt to it, and her manner of speaking was careless in the extreme- skipping over any sound which wasn't strictly necessary. The men in the bar talked that way, with voices and mannerisms which grew rougher and wilder every time the bartender slapped a fresh mug down on the table.

"Polite kitty, aren't you?"

"I try to be."

The dunmer laughed. "Just as well, boy. Best not to irritate me." Zahn thought so too.

He got to his feet when she did, although he found the process exceptionally difficult. His balance felt off, his brain too groggy to bother with little things like motor control.

The fyoda's path proved steep, smooth, and very windswept. Ash stung Zahn's eyes, even though he kept his hand spread protectively across his face. The ash clung to his sweat-dampened frame until he became nearly as dark as his dunmer companion. Slow going, even on a downhill path. Then Zahn inadvertently stumbled on a way to speed things up a bit.

Half blinded, fevered, and injured- it was only a wonder it hadn't happened sooner. Zahn's foot came down on a stray stone, and it slid out from under him like trap-shingles set on greased tracks. Gravity seized its chance, dragging him down the steep incline in an disjointed tumble which he couldn't control, and couldn't stop. It didn't end until he struck an upright stone hard enough to jar every bone in his body.

Zahn could have laughed. He'd survived Grief and a band of cuthroat slavers, only to be killed by a clumsy mistep. He could have laughed- if his ribs hadn't hurt so much.

He couldn't even think of getting up. That just wasn't possible. Then a pair of boots skidded into his field of vision, and the assassin stood over him.

"Idiot," she said, irritated and indisposed. She reached down and wrenched him upright by his arm. Pure agony arched through the whole of his shoulder and right down his spine, and then jarred loose again as the dunmer pulled the injured limb around her neck and held it there, merciless.

Zahn once heard a theory, proposed by a mage, that sooner or later under conditions of persistent pain, the victim ought to loose their sensitivity to it, in the same way which an unpleasent odor could become bearable, or even unnoticeable after a while. Bad smell would eventually go away, and so should pain.

Hypothesis invalidated, mr. mage. Dead wrong on this one.

The pain didn't go away. Instead it mushroomed into every corner of his being and hiijacked his other senses, squeezing them into smaller and smaller spaces just so that it could have as much of him as possible. It swelled, and seethed, and simmered.

Mostly, it hurt.

* * *

Trask remembered this path. Remembered the stumbling gait and the urgency, although this time the pain wasn't her own. She'd tracked the criminal across the barren landscape for miles, on a path as twisted as the turnings of a snake. He'd been her hardest hunt, if not the longest- taking to the bleak wilderness as though become one with the harsh environment. It might have taken her weeks to find him, if a chance misstep hadn't landed him in the pit.

A hot spring pool, choked with gray ash and looking deceptively solid in the moonlight. He'd sank rapidly, enveloped nearly to his chest when she finally caught up to him. But his arms were clear, and he held his lacerated face up towards the moonlight as he struggled to fight free.

_"It's over,"_ she told him, and reached out a hand. His claws nearly rent it through. In the shock of pain, she nearly fell to his intention and tumbled head-first into the pit. But she caught herself in time, falling back onto the ground while the shock wore off and the pain escalated to agony. He laughed, threw his head back and howled at the double moon.

_"To the hells,"_ he told her. _"take your soul to the pits, Dunmer. I die free." _

She walked for days, fending off attacking creatures, surviving. Barely. With no source of life to draw from, the wound had settled into her flesh and festered like the blight itself.

Now, with the cat's arm hooked around her neck and his weight dragging at her side, Trask remembered these things. And, just like in her memories, the twin towers materialized out of the storm and began to grow clearer with every step. A lie which came true, a mirage which became reality.

* * *

Things changed eventually, but by that point the lines between reality and hallucination had gotten a little blurred.

"Better to learn a spell, girl. At least keep a scroll with you."

"Restoration is- not one of my talents, sera."

"Easy as falling off a fence. Even a simple spell could have saved you a good deal of trouble.

Watch, I'll show you. Like this..."

Cold flooded through Zahn like a wave, washing away his fever. Then a second spell hit, seeping through skin and flesh to enchant broken bones back together into seamless perfection.

"More tricky, that last one, but if you applied yourself it would come to you soon. Ah, I think it's waking up."

Zahn took his cue and opened his eyes. He stared up into two faces. Both were dark and ash-gray. Both were grinning. The similarities ended there.

Where the assassin's familiar face was smooth and ageless, a typical dunmer countenance, the other had a face like gnarled wood- all twists and folds and gnarled crevices with bright, slanted eyes narrowed to gleeful slits. Zahn couldn't begin to guess how old she was, but she'd likely lived long enough to make up for several of his own lifespans, even if he were being very optimistic about his chances at old age. And considering recent events, he figured he maybe shouldn't count on that.

"Told you I could get it working again," said the old dunmer woman, her cackling voice triumphant. "And you said I couldn't!"

"Never doubted you for an instant," said the assassin, smoothly. Coins clinked and the healer's grin stretched even wider, enveloping her own wrinkles.

"Say what you like, dear, so long as your coin stays good. Now, get yer brat out of my infirmary."

The "brat" sat himself up. He felt- fine. Better then he had for days.

"Thank you," he said to the healer.

The witch cackled. "Ey, girl, this un's got _manners." _Despite the laugh, the old crones eyes narrowed. "But the way it talks..."

Zahn's ears twitched. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, noticing for the first time that it was a proper bed and not just a cot. This room was well furnished and well-lit, cooler than the season and clean. He hadn't the faintest idea where they could be.

"My names Zahn," he mentioned offhandedly.

"Imported?"

"Immigrated- no. Native born," said Zahn. He was fairly certain the old woman heard him. Possibly she even listened, but she certainly didn't respond.

"Not your usual sort of business, Trask."

"No," agreed the assassin, "and I'd best get it over with. Come on, cat."

Zahn clenched both hands into fists, and took a deep breath. Then he deliberately straightened his fingers and let the breath out slowly, gently. "Clothes," he said, quiet but firm.

The pronouncement fell into a momentary pause. The assassin stared at him, and he stared back. He kept his face bland, but refused to look away. After what felt like a sizable segment of eternity, the dunmer's face abruptly broke out into a wide grin.

"Glad to see your recovering," she said, dryly. "Well. Very well."

Zahn pulled the loose white shirt over his shoulders, and shrugged into the accompanying vest. Khajiit didn't need clothes. It wasn't only dunmer slavers who held that notion, many Khajiit found the concept equally ridiculous. But Zahn had been taught a different way of thinking, a different way of living. And in the civilized world, some cures created their own cancers.

Zahn laced the vest and glanced aside to where the two Dunmer women sat at a table, speaking amiably. He approached quietly and leaned against the wall, thinking that maybe he'd listen in. But the assassin looked up at once, and the old woman followed her gaze.

"Don't see the point," the witch grumbled. "Well. Would have been a pretty bargain in the old days, girl, I'll grant you that much. But I don't understand what you're up to now."

Trask shrugged. "The old days aren't so long gone," she said, smiling faintly.

The old woman looked suddenly solemn, and her eyes dropped to the mug between her withered hands.

"True change is the work of moments," she said softly. "In a day. In an hour. Aren't we all relics of the past?"

The assassin's smile twisted slightly, and she looked away. "Change," she said, as though agreeing to something. Then, "Thought about moving out, crone? A lot of the garrison are."

The old woman shook her head, lips curling slightly. "Never been anywhere but 'ere, girl. And myself- I'm a little old for changing."

Zahn heard the bitter resignation in healer's voice. Like a parent who'd lived to bury all of her children and grandchildren. Lived to bury too many friends and companions, that was certain.

"Well." The woman's voice became brisk. Her eyes gained a mischievous twinkle. "You still owe me, girl," she said, "coin or no coin. And don't you forget it."

"How could I, crone, when you're so fond of reminding me?" The assassin pushed back her chair and stood up. The old woman rose as well.

"I'll remind you again the next time you come landing some sorry slab of meat in my infirmary."

"I'll look forward to it." Between these two, that seemed like an adequate farewell. The assassin turned her back and strode out of the infirmary door without a backwards glance.

Zahn paused for a second. "Thanks," he said. "for the healing- and for the clothes."

The old woman, deprived of a fellow superior being to address her comments to, met his eyes for the first time. She pursed her lips severely.

"Still say you didn't need 'em."

Zahn decided not to decide anything about that comment. He hurried after Trask.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

It wasn't until they stepped outside and Zahn turned his head to see the twin towers of Dusk and Dawn that he finally realized what place they'd come to.

He stopped in his tracks. Trask, realizing it, turned to regard him quizzically.

"Ghostgate." he said. The assassin simply looked at him.

"Yes?"

"You didn't tell me this was Ghostgate." He spun around and caught the door before it fully closed. The assassin said something, but he didn't wait around to hear what. Left turn, ramp, stairs- he slipped by a startled armager(sp) and finally found the right door, all the while aware of hurried footsteps at his back. But it didn't matter, because he reached the dome before she reached him.

The ring of shrines, a pool in the center, exactly as it had been sketched in the old book, the one cook had. It was a pilgrim's account, and Saxtus had laughed at the notion of selling occult memoirs- said it must be a profitable business, pilgrimage. Not half so lucrative as divine priesthood, cook had muttered later. She'd said it under her breath, but not so low that her young charge couldn't hear.

Zahn had loved the book, but it didn't have anything to do with religion. Pilgrimage in Morrowind wasn't like pilgrimage in Cyrodil. It was dangerous, and often led to adventures and lessons and discoveries with a far wider scope than simple spirituality. Bandits and beasts, bad weather and beautiful things you could only see if you were willing to take the risk.

And Ghostgate. Of all the stories, few compared to the ones told about Ghostgate. A lot of those stories concerned Vivec, but those weren't the ones young Zahn had liked best. The ones he liked best were about the Buoyant Armigers

themselves- the people who stood against the blight every day, right on the edge of Red Mountain itself.

"Cat." came a sharp voice. A hand landed on his shoulder, and he turned to see the assassin. Probably not a very pleased one, but her face didn't show either way. "What's gotten into you?"

"I've never been here."

"Now you have."

"Yes."

"And now we're leaving."

Zahn tried to step out from under the hand, but the dunmer's fingers tightened painfully.

"Can't I just look? While we're here?" The assassin's impassivity finally fractured. Her eyes narrowed and her brows came down, and the fingers digging into his shoulder really, truly began to hurt.

"What do you think I am, brat? Your personal guide?" She pulled him closer, until their faces were inches apart. "Don't _ever_ make me chase after you again."

She didn't add an "Or else." she didn't need to; the threat was inherent in her voice. Zahn fell still. There'd been dunmer back home, there were Dunmer everywhere on Vvardenfell. It was their native land, after all. Dour, pridefull, aloof- downright cruel, sometimes, but not to him. They rarely noticed him enough for that. Their children were another matter, but that was simply the nature of children confronted by something different from themselves. Zahn suffered no illusions about children- children could be hateful, even deadly. But you could forgive children, because they saw black and white and were only just learning about gray.

Now he'd fallen into a very different kind of world. Grief hadn't cared about black or white, because in Grief's world, there had only been Grief. Everything else was relative to Grief. The only things that mattered mattered because they pertained to him. Zahn saw something of that in Trask's eyes, too; heard in her voice. Like a ship which had gone too long from any harbor, and begun to doubt any reality but itself.

Zahn's use pertained to Trask. Zahn didn't.

"I won't," he said.

"Good."

"I'll tell you where I'm going next time."

The assassin stared at him. He winced and shuffled his feet until she let go of him. She did that very slowly, one finger at a time, like cook unsticking her claws from a dishtowel after Saxtus had invaded the kitchen to complain.

"_Next_ time?" she repeated.

"...I'm hungry." it seemed as good a time as any to mention it. Zahn crossed his arms over his ribs, and met the incredulous stare head-on. "It's been a while," he said, "and magic isn't food."

"Next best thing," the assassin pointed out.

"But not food."

The elf's lips drew back, the white crescent of teeth a sharp contrast to her dusky skin. "You're hungry. You were just telling me not to take you back- now you're hungry."

Zahn hesitated. "I think you're going to anyway," he said.

"Yes."

"But if you _weren't, _then you wouldn't feed me."

"What makes you think I will, in any case?"

The cat hesitated. "Just a guess."

Not a bad one, either. Likely- very likely- it had been a while. Starvation was one of the most basic tactics in Grief's arsenal. Simple, where simplicity had never been the old slaver's style, but the beauty of simplicity was that it so often _worked. _

The old healer's pick-me-up wouldn't last forever, and Trask had no intention of dragging the khajiit cross-country by his tail if he collapsed again. The downhill trek to Ghostgate, encumbered by the boy's dead weight, had been quite enough. Trask felt the headache beginning to build in her skull, the one that came when she'd been away from the tavern for too long. No cure in sight, not on a job- she didn't drink on jobs. An easy rule to follow, normally. But this wasn't a normal job, and Zahn wasn't a normal complication.

"Food," Trask agreed, voice coming out as an exasperated growl. "_Then_ we leave."

* * *

"Not your usual kind of job, Trask. Old habits die hard, eh?"

Trask refused to be annoyed. "I do what pays, Bryne. Always have."

The cook, bartender, and all-round beloved dispenser of foodstuffs, leaned against the counter and watched Trask stuff half a breadcrust into a bowl of faintly steaming broth. Cliffracer, probably, although god only knew how many the hunters must have gone through before they acquired an unblighted slab of meat. Bad hunting, bad water, abysmal weather. But becoming better, becoming notably better these last few months.

"What about you, Bryne? You going to be here next time I come through?"

The bartender scratched his hairless head, the tracery of old scars across his face drawing contorted lines through his wrinkles.

"Nowhere else to be," he said, after a moment's thought. He sighed. "Lot 'o the young bucks moving off, of course. But us old ones... well. Gets to be home after a while. We'll be sitting here till someone tells us to move." Trask simply nodded. Bryne smirked. "What? Worried you have to chase my wonderful cooking to some other town? I'll be here, Trask. My regulars can count on me." The bartender winked at Zahn, who sat with his own bowl cupped between his paws. He'd eaten slowly. Once, after getting lost and locked into an undercroft for two entire days, he'd learned the hard way about how you shouldn't fill an empty stomach too quickly.

It hadn't occurred to him that the Armigers would be leaving now, but of course... why stay? Ghostgate guarded nothing except a fyoda trail, one of many now that the gate itself no longer contained the mountain. A place for pilgrims. A place for people who had lived here long enough to call it home. But not a place for warriors and heros anymore. All those stories cook had told would become history-stories, with no grounding and no basis in current reality. Good tales for kittens, safe and dusty and not likely to inspire them to go running off to fight blighted beasts in the company of elvish heroes.

Zahn finished the contents of his bowl, and Trask pushed her own away.

Bryne gave the assassin a long, speculative look. "Not in a drinking mood tonight?" he asked.

"The hells I'm not." Trask jerked a thumb in Zahn's direction. "Got a job."

She pushed back her stool and dropped a few coins onto the counter. "I'd recommend using meat next time, old man- not boiled leather."

"Oi!" Said Bryne, pretending to take offense. "The best, I tell you, only the best- damned ingrate. The Cat liked it. Didn't you, cat?"

"Only the very _best_ leather, I'm sure." Zahn said. Bryne laughed raucously and slapped a hand down on the counter.

"See? 's like I said. The best. I _like_ this cat, Trask. Who is he?"

"A runaway."

"I didn't-" Zahn began, but then he stopped. Neither of the elves paid any attention.

"Oh?" the bartender's voice had grown slightly more serious. His eyes were fixed questioningly on Trask. "But you said-"

"Not that kind of a runaway." Trask said. Bryn still looked doubtfull.

"None of my business," he said, "'S just that with the new law, and everything-"

"None of your business," Trask agreed, curtly.

The bartender opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He'd been about to mention the group who'd come through the tower earlier, a couple of roughs who'd been gently "moved along" by the remaining garrison after they tried to insist that the local healer work free of charge. Dronos the smith swore that some of his stock had gone missing around that time. Bryne had been about to say something but...

But it wasn't any of his business.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

"This will do," said Merl. He dropped his threadbare cloak to the ground and kneeled atop it, watching the trail below. He leaned the stolen bow at his side, and lay the quiver close to his hand. His companions fell in beside him, with the exception of the blinded dunmer, Anri. Anri lay where they'd left him, a dirty cloth bound tightly over his eyes.

_ Useless,_ Merl thought. They'd have ditched him long ago, except that he'd heard too much. Easier to cut his throat, but that was an unpleasant business and they'd thought to leave him to his own, natural death. But it hadn't come, for all his feebleness, and he'd stumbled along with them like a crippled gaur. They'd have to deal with him. Later.

Neither of the others had broached the subject so far, so Merl let it lie. If his companions wanted to object, they could quarrel about it after they'd killed the assassin.

_ Anyone can die_, Merl thought. The words had run through his mind continuously since Grief unexpected downfall, echoing like one of his mother's occultist mantras. _Anyone can die. _

A knife to the eye, an arrow to the heart... that woman had shown him such a useful thing.

* * *

They were headed towards the city of Ald-Ruhn, according to a sign. The assassin, Trask, hadn't told him that. The assassin hadn't said four consecutive words since they left Ghostgate.

Still, Zahn might have enjoyed the journey under other circumstances. The air was clear, and a slight breeze relieved the day's heat. He'd never been so far north in his life- not in a mind to appreciate it, at any rate. Not in any mind at all. He remembered the shelter, the friendly wave, the easy smile. Upon waking, a bruise on the back of his head accounted for the rest. Vera had exorcised the physical ache, but the old healer couldn't expunge the other pain.

He hadn't killed the girl. Trask said that he had not. But Zahn still felt the blood on his hands.

Eyes on the ground, entirely lost in his own thoughts, Zahn didn't notice that Trask had stopped until he nearly ran into her. He halted just in time. A gloved fist thudding against his chest helped him with that, and nearly sent him sprawling besides.

"Stop," said Trask, somewhat unnecessarily.

Zahn recovered his balance and looked around. Path gave way to more path. Nothing strange, nothing out of place. "Why?"

Silver flashed in the sunlight as the assassin's hand shot out towards Zahn. Zahn ducked instinctively. A second later, something large and leathery flattened him the rest of the way.

For a second Zahn was back in the cavern, scrabbling to free himself from Grief's last, indifferent embrace. Heart pounding, he shoved the leather mess away from him. A few drops of blood soaked into the collar of his threadbare shirt. For the second time in his life, Zahn heard the sound of a knife working free from flesh.

His stomach lurched. A blade striking home didn't make much of a sound because it happened so quickly; a knife on a chopping block had as much impact. But coming out again, wet and scraping- that was the worst.

He wasn't even aware that he'd pressed a hand hard into his own left eye, the only one which Grief had had left to loose, before he lost it. The image came clear into his mind, and it was the first time he'd thought about it without the distortions of pain and sickness.

Grief was dead. Several others too. So was the emaciated slave, the one whom Grief had said counted for nothing. But in Zahn's mind, she outweighed Grief a hundred times over. Some urchin, maybe, picked out of a city slum. An orphan or a foundling, abandoned willingly or no. Abandoned, all the same.

Zahn closed his eyes and clenched his fists, dropping his head into his folded arms. Her dull yellow gaze waited behind his closed eyelids. What had Grief tricked her into believing? What could make anyone's eyes that empty?

"I'm glad he's dead." Zahn said, quietly, to himself.

"Just a cliffracer, cat," said the assassin. She used the racer's wing to wipe the daedric blade clean of blood, and then the weapon vanished out of her hand as if it had never been. Her comment brought Zahn back to the present reality, and he shook his head.

"Grief," he explained. "I'm glad. Is that wrong?"

The assassin stared down at him for a long moment. Then she grinned, a sharp crescent of white in her dusky skin. But the expression didn't ring true, didn't reach her eyes or disguise the slight twist at each corner of her mouth.

"You're asking me?"

"Don't you know?"

The dunmer laughed. Short, and harsh.

"Right, wrong- Grief called them lies, cat. Illusions. Watch the righteous ones get hungry, and hurt. See how they behave then. Right and wrong can't even outweigh an empty belly."

Even after a snake died, the poison spread. One could hate the snake, and rage against it- but hate and rage only spread the poison faster. Just like a snake, Grief could sink his fangs into a person's mind and leave behind something to outlive him, depositing a part of himself into the very heart that hated him most.

Zahn blinked until the tears went away, and thought about those big, empty yellow eyes. The dunmer woman's were narrow and hard, and as cold as her words. And they were quite a lot of words, as many as she'd ever said to him at one time.

"That's what Grief wanted you to believe?"

"It's truth, cat. Belief has nothing to do with it."

He searched, trying to find the right words to give back, trying to shape his fleeting flash of insight into something that would make sense for a mind which was so very different from his own.

"The collar." he said, finally.

"What of it?"

"You said that it only works after you believe in it. Once you believe in it- it _becomes_ true. We make it true, by believing." Trask made a sharp motion with her hand, dismissal.

"An empty belly, the fear of pain; belief breaks. Truth remains." Like the bottom of an abyss, like a long fall onto unforgiving stone. Zahn saw the truths of Trask's world, and came one dangerous step towards understanding her. But he shook his head and the connection was gone.

"I don't think so. I don't think it's like that. Belief doesn't fail. We fail to believe."

The assassin stood, and studied him from that vantage. Her expression was odd, wry- chagrined, even, as though she were asking herself how this conversation had happened in the first place. Zahn expected her to shrug if off and turn away, dismiss it with a short laugh and an indifferent grin. Instead she caught him by surprise, reaching down a hand to him which he took after a second's shocked hesitation. She pulled him up so they were on a level, eye to eye.

"Live longer, boy," she said, the words coming through a taut smile. Too tight, too strained, and possibly the most genuine expression he'd ever seen on her face. "Live long enough, and we'll see about that."

* * *

Meril saw her first. He felt the others tense into awareness beside him, breaths catching and eyes narrowing. Anyone can die, Meril reminded himself- anyone. Anyone at all.

He drew the notched arrow back centimeter by centimeter, as though she might somehow hear him from below. He centered on her head, followed it. An easy shot, once chance. No odds at all, even though his hands wanted to shake, even though he felt the adrenalin building and felt his own heart pounding the inside of his ribs as though telling him not to do this.

But he couldn't miss, he couldn't possibly miss. He held his breath and steadied his hands, counting to three. Then, just as his fingers released the taut sinew, Anri screamed.

The sound jerked the assassin around and the arrows passed an inch from her ear.

* * *

Trask ran for cover. She turned her head to scream an order at Zahn when the second bolt took her just below the heart.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Meril hadn't waited. Screaming a curse, he knocked and fired a second time with the same speed which had recommended him to Grief.

Trask was moving when the arrow struck, and she kept moving the few critical steps that brought her directly beneath the archer's vantage point where an overhang placed her out of sight, out of range. For now.

If her attackers hadn't hesitated, if they'd come down at once then it would have ended there. But they were afraid. None had time to see the injury clearly, no more clearly than they'd seen her last wound, one which had turned out to be no wound at all. They hovered, they waited- afraid of finding something functioning and deadly hidden by the concave cliff below.

Trask lay against the stone, staring up. Her mouth tasted of blood, and her coat was warm and wet. She knew, knew from old lessons in anatomy as well as her own faltering senses, that the arrowhead had punctured her right lung. She estimated that it would take her killers a few moments to summon up the courage and come for her. If they were braver than she gave them credit for, they might even come in time to finish their job properly.

She's seen the brat, in that second after the arrow hit. Looked up and seen the face peering down at her. Blood trickled from her mouth when she laughed, a silent motion that shook the pain straight through every part of her. All the scheming, all the lies and resources her enemies had spent for this moment, all boiled down to one brat's solitary, low-brow greed over the hide of a single khajiit. And that khajiit might be the only one to regret it, if only a little.

Life must have it's little jokes.

Along with it's little surprises.

One of those little surprises loomed over her know, a spell blossoming to life between his outstretched paws. The small flare of magic flared and died, fizzling out the moment it struck her skin.

"No good, cat." her own voice sounded strange, rasping and faint. "Won't work."

"Why?" Zahn leaned over her, close enough to catch the words. Closer than she wanted him. "What do I do?" Low and urgent and alarmed, distressed in voice and feature with his ears flat back against his skull and his eyes round as a bird's. Trask tried to stare past him, but couldn't. His face enveloped her entire view.

The last thing she'd see? Trask closed her eyes, and gritted her teeth around the too-familiar taste of her own blood. Somewhere above, she heard stones clattering. One way out, now. Except that it was hard to think and harder to talk.

Her mind had drifted, slid free of her iron control and begun to remember the things she normally kept safely steeped in the alcohol, buried alongside her in the most bottomless bars available. Scarred hand, snarling face.

Wouldn't take her hand. He'd sink and he'd suffocate, his bones would lie deep in the bubbling pit forever. Free. Damned and dead, but free. Her worst enemy- and the only Khajiit she'd ever respected.

"Trask!" Hard grip on her shoulder. _Hard._ And it came with a prickle of claws which were just beginning to grow out.

The cat was scared, damn scared. Did he think it made a difference, one elf or another? He shook at her, and now her shoulder was bleeding too. Another rattle of rocks. They were coming, circling around, wide and wary.

"Please?" his fear and desperation confused her. She couldn't tell which hand was which. But the scars across her palm seemed to re-open again, and she could see Zahn's face through her closed eyelids. Except that it shifted, changed, grew grizzled and gray and scarred. The monster was smiling.

Waiting.

She opened her eyes and again saw the reality, the young, sand-furred fool of a khajiit. Fool enough not to believe that one elf was much like another, and that, for him, all dunmer were one and the same.

One way out.

"Glove," she rasped. "take off- glove."

He didn't get it, didn't hear, or didn't comprehend. But then she moved her hand, a faint scuffle in the dust and his gaze fell on it. Her hands were cold and bloodless, she barely felt him pulling off the glove. But she did feel the tingle of energy flowing to her finger ends, gathering there. The hand lifted, propelled by the spell as much as her own will.

It clicked, then, she watched it happening in the Khajiit's face. Suspicion, if not understanding. He shied away, and that slight motion was more than she could match. It was over, and she was dead. Didn't matter how. Maybe she'd die in the seconds it took her attacker to reach her, or maybe they'd have time to watch her die. Her hand began to fall back to her side, the spell fading out, but Zahn caught it. Lifted it, uncertainly.

The spell, learned long ago, and learned so well that it had become instinct, made the necessary connection.

* * *

Meril edged around, a good ten feet away from the blind spot. The other two made a show of following, but he didn't miss their expressions, or the way that that they both seemed ready to flee at a moment's notice. Brave enough to slit Anri's throat, sure. Brave enough for that. Not so brave about this.

Meril gritted his teeth, and held his bow steady while he inched around. He saw the khajiit, first; bright against the dark stone. The cat leaned over something. Someone?

Meril couldn't shoot while the cat was there, without the cat this entire thing would be pointless. They needed the reward. _He_ needed the reward.

"Get away from there, cat!" he called.

Zahn didn't move at once. Then his back arched and his head reared back and his entire body convulsed, once. The tension dissipated as though it had never been, and he fell to the side. Limp. Lifeless? Meril snarled. The damned woman had killed him in spite!

That made sense to Meril. It was what Meril would have done.

A dark shape rose out of the shadows, sitting up and putting the khajiit's body aside. Meril didn't wait to see clearly, he aimed and fired directly towards the assassin's center. It didn't matter where it struck. When he was finished, the monster would look like an old hag's pincussion.

Even a vampire couldn't survive that.

But the arrow never reached her. A ball of flame erupted from shallow overhang, coming straight along the arrow's path. Straight back at him. Meril flinched away, but not fast enough. The flame caught at his hair and seared the side of his face. The heat was so intense that for a second it didn't even hurt. But once it began, it became a kind of pain he'd never felt before. There's no comparing to the things which fire does to flesh, and the entire left side of his face was awash with it. His skin was gone. His eye still existed, but only as pain. The knife, penetrating his heart a second later, didn't hurt as much. And after a little while, the hurt had to go on without him, because Meril was gone.

* * *

Zahn didn't remember what had happened, exactly. The experience was a white haze in his memory, something that his mind couldn't- or wouldn't- probe. But he could guess what had happened. He could guess because his eyes felt as though they'd been waited shut with bricks and his heart had all it could do to keep pumping. He felt like a rag that had been wrung out. Something left inside, but not a lot. Just enough. Barely.

Sounds came distantly, distorted. Fighting, a scream. Nightmare senses experienced by a lucid consciousness; no doubt but he was awake. Trapped within broken senses, but awake. Rational and functioning.

She'd taken something out of him, and used it. Like a vampire, but that wasn't how vampires went about it. Some spell, maybe. Zahn struggled against his lethargy, and made no headway. He wondered if maybe this was how comatose people felt. Saxtus had said about that, about people who got hurt so bad that they didn't wake up, but didn't die. Said it wasn't any way to be. Said better to die, and that dying was a favor to people like that. Edeth said no, said keep them safe and alive until some healer worked out how to wake them. Mage might do it, maybe. No telling what state the restored person's mind would be in, though; some very odd cases indeed came up in those stories.

_ I'm comatose_, Zahn thought. _If they wake me up, I'll be an Odd Case._

And Saxtus would say... something only slightly less harsh than what he would have said anyway.

It occurred to Zahn that maybe he wasn't quite so lucid as he'd thought. Without his senses to keep him anchored in, his thoughts floated aimlessly like a ship adrift. Hard to concentrate on the here and now, when the here was invisible to him and the now had become entirely relative. He heard only silence outside, nothing loud enough to breach the barriers. Isolation.

_ Don't like this._

Ghosts raised by necromancers must have limited senses, maybe a tenth of what living people had. And ghosts would do anything to hang onto them. Anything to feel grounded, in touch with something, part of something, instead of a collection of unraveling thoughts and emotions, cut free and set to drift.

_ Don't like this!_

Didn't want to die, Saxtus, wrong. Wanted to live. Wanted very desperately to live, just not like this. If this was life. What if he'd died? Or what if he was just now dying?

Something tickled the back of his throat. And just like that, he had a throat again. And then he started having other things, like a chest and lungs and the awareness that both were still working, not just the faint pounding of his own heart, and this heartbeat wasn't so faint anymore, and then it was again because other things drowned it out.

Zahn coughed and choked and managed to get about half of the liquid where it was meant to go. He lay on his back, head elevated by a none-to-gentle grip. He hurt, and he felt half-choked, but that was fine. His thoughts were safely enclosed in a solid skull, and no matter about the headache.

He opened his eyes, and stared into a familiar black-and-red gaze. The assassin let go, and his head smacked back against the stone. More headache. He winced, and watched her toss the emptied bottle aside.

"Wasn't expecting to have to use that so soon," she said. Then she sat, and simply looked. Zahn sat up and followed her gaze, only to wish that he hadn't. Three of their attackers lay dead, scattered across the path. One quite gruesomely so.

"Fools," said Trask, quietly.

Zahn shook his head in bewilderment. "Why did they attack us?"

The assassin slanted a glance aside at him, and showed a flash of teeth in what might have been a smile, except it didn't quite look like one.

"You don't know?"

Zahn didn't. "They were mad? About Grief?"

The assassin's laughter rang out across the fyoda floor and bounced back from the boulders, raising a brief, sharp echo.

"No." she said, with finality. "Not that."

"Then what-"

"It seems I owe you."

Zahn blinked. The assassin had turned towards him. Sitting on her haunches, elbows braced against her knees, she regarded him intently. "I'm not fond of debt, boy. Ask for something."

Easy enough. "Let me go."

"Out here?" The assassin grinned wryly. "No favor at all, cat. You'd die."

"Then teach me not to."

"Teach you not to die?"

"Teach me how to live."

Quiet, then, quite a lot of it. The stillness stretched, long enough for Zahn to realize that she was considering it. But no sooner had he begun to suspect that when she spoke:

"Impossible. With you, there's no chance."

No chance, no possibility. Hadn't he heard that all his life? Except for Grief; dark thought. Grief had found a use for him.

"I can learn," Zahn said, quietly. "I _can_ learn, sera. Won't you let me try?"

"Learn to kill? Learn to trick, before you're tricked- strike, before your struck? Are these the things I should teach you?"

"No," Zahn said, "Trading. Tracking. Hunting. How to deal with merchants."

"Those won't keep you alive."

"You said ask. I've asked." Zahn wished the headache would go away, but he knew that wouldn't happen anytime soon. The memory of being adrift with nothing but his own thoughts was slowly fading away, and the discomfort had stopped being comforting. Now, a headache was really just a headache, not the reassuring proof that he had a head.

"I don't shortchange." Trask rose to her feet, and offered a hand. Downright courteous. "I'll pay you back when I see a way."

Zahn decided not to argue. Instead he asked, "And you won't take me back?"

"I won't."

He nodded, too tired and shell-shocked to thing further then that just now. Not going back. Maybe later he'd get around to being concerned about what was going to happen to him. At least he knew what wasn't going to happen.

"Thanks."


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

They moved slowly over the next few days, wandering down out of the mountain region and into the Ascadian borderlands. Trask never volunteered their destination, and but the Khajiit didn't seem to care. He kept pace with her during the day, carrying the pack. Sometimes he talked. Rarely, very rarely, she did, telling him the kinds of things a traveler had to know, about weather and shelter and how to take direction from the stars.

Trask was in no hurry. Let the informant have time, time to suspect her death- time to assume it, if he was fool enough. She set a slow, meandering pace during the days, and by night, after they'd found a place to sleep, she lay in the dark and listened to the Khajiit's nightmares.

They weren't loud, but she knew the sound. Recognized the uneven breathing and the restless energy which stalked a sleeper into oblivion and haunted them there, unrelenting. Sometimes the shadows would remain in his golden eyes for far into the morning, until the sun finally burned them away.

On one particularly bad day, they were trudging along the edge of a stream when Trask came to an abrupt halt. Zahn, eyes fixed on the ground, nearly ran into her.

"Take off the pack," Trask told him. There was a pause, then a thump. Good. She kicked pack, hooked her foot under the khajiit's ankle and jerked him off balance. A well-placed shove did the rest. She was rewarded by a splash.

His head broke the surface a second later, eyes wide in the shock of cold water- and the shock of the water itself, where he hadn't been expecting it.

"W-what was the for?" Trask smiled, and shrugged out of her coat. .

"The smell."

"Oh." the cat looked honestly chagrined. "But my clothes-"

"-Smelled too." Trask shrugged out of her shirt, and watched the cat's eyes dart away. If Khajiit blushed, no one knew about it, but his ears went flat against his head. Worth some thought, that. Most khajiit, confronted with the sight of a naked elf or human, wouldn't so much as blink. No point, with such different species- it would be like taking offense at the sight of a naked gaur.

She wondered about it. Wondered just how unusual Zahn's situation had been.

Ought to have gotten more out of Meril.

-Too late now.

The water broke over her skin as she dived, taking away the dust and letting her go on without it. She came up a few paces away from Zahn, who was still dutifully looking at everything except her.

"Sand." She said.

That got a glance, and the glance got another flattening of ears, another embarrassed jerk of the head.

"Um. What about it?"

"It's not soap. But it's as good as we're going to get. Wring out your clothes and spread them out on the bank. They'll be done before you are."

The cat did, trying to act nonchalant about it. But his ears gave him away. Only very young Khajiit didn't know about the ears, only the kittens were amazed when their mothers could read them like open scrolls. Better, in fact, since many khajiit never learned to read at all. But the kittens caught on quickly, mostly by watching one another. Zahn, it seemed, had not. He didn't know about the ears.

Trask did not enlighten him. "It pays," she said, "to be presentable when you enter a town. Pays very literally, cat. Better service, same price." She considered that, and didn't add the caveat- unless the town's short on law. In which case, it was good to be as unsavory as possible and keep a weapon in plain view.

"So we're going into town?"

"Yeah. Place called Suran. Spend the night indoors, do a little trading. Show you how to barter."

She kept her tone casual. And elven ears were stationary from birth.

* * *

Zahn knew about bars. Bars smelled like sweat and mold and alcohol, and they were full of people who smelled like a lot of other, equally pleasant things. Sometimes bars had music, a street performer maybe, or the odd drunken chorus.

This wasn't a bar.

A low, hypnotic rhythm pulsed through the incensed air and reverberated gently from the establishment's subterranean walls. Zahn smelled skooma, and the unmistakable scent made him light-headed. Saxtus said that Khajiit were born addicts. Literally. Got it from the mother, in a culture which revolved around the moonsugar. The substance, a regular part of a mother's diet, found it's way to the kittens long before they drew their first breath.

But the rich variety of cloying scents and the ceaseless drum beat weren't the only things making his head spin. Neither had anything on the dancers. Zahn kept his eyes on the table and tried not to look, but they were still _there, _standing on raised platforms at the room's far side.

The other people in the bar stared, quite directly. Of course they did. That was the point.

Zahn twitched a little when the table was invaded, a hand coming down with a mug. He blinked, and looked up into the feline features of a young Khajiit female. For a second his mind blanked, flashing back to a different girl, and a set of large, yellow eyes. But these eyes were green, and the girl was older, better fed, and very much alive.

She said something.

"I'm sorry?" Zahn blinked, and Green-Eyes smiled.

"It is new? Stranger here?" she spoke with a thick accent, undercut by the faintest suggestion of a purr. She seemed in quite a good mood. The sugar, perhaps. Or possibly the skooma he'd scented earlier.

"Yes," he admitted. "First time here." He'd meant "in town," but her grin took it another way. First time _here._

"Drink," she invited. "the drink, it helps. See my sisters- they dance very good?"

"Yes." Zahn didn't look. He looked at the drink instead.

_ Not a good idea. _

"See?" The Khajiit girl was saying. "There, there is Marelle," she pointed at the platform on the far left, "and Runa, and Caminda-" she stopped. The third stage stood empty.

"Not this one," said a voice from directly behind Zahn. He twitched, feeling a light hand descend on his shoulder. "he came with Trask."

"Oh." The Green-eye's voice changed considerably, dropping the kittenish tone and the faint purr. She smiled apologetically. "Sorry."

"It's fine," said Zahn, although he wasn't entirely certain what he was forgiving. Caminda, a redguard woman, scraped back the chair beside him and sat down lightly.

"So who are you?" she asked, dark eyes direct and curious. She leaned forward, elbows on the table. She really, truly ought to have been wearing more.

"I'm Zahn," Zahn admitted.

"Yes," Caminda gestured impatiently. "but- why? With the slaver?"

The beat dimmed, fading out of Zahn't consciousness for the space of a heartbeat. Just gone. He felt like he'd dropped something, but didn't know what. Only that it was important.

"Slaver?" his own voice sounded odd in his ears. The dancer gave him an odd look. Suddenly she reached out and caught his wrist, lifting it from the table for a closer look. He took it back, and she met his eyes.

"Never been, have you? And you talk strange." Her brow furrowed like she was trying to remember something.

"Trask's a slaver?" Keep her talking, keep her distracted.

"You didn't know?" The dancer grinned, tilting back and hooking her arms over the back of the chair. "Yeah. Big name around here. -Retired now. Weird to see her with a khajiit."

"I-"

Zahn stopped.

"Hey," said a newcomer. Another one of the dancers had come down from the stage. The last girl, the Breton called Marelle, had taken the center place, which kept the watchers happy- Zahn, looking up, caught the glare she leveled at the two defectors.

And then she looked at him.

Too much attention. Zahn felt adrenaline building in his veins, and looked for Trask to come back, but the bar remained empty.

"We can't all be down here," Caminda folded her arms.

"Can't help it," complained the newcomer, the girl whom the Khajiit had pointed out as Runa. "It's boring. Ever since Muvis left-"

"N'wah," growled Green-Eyes

"But he could play," Runa pointed out. She looked towards the stage, and Zahn noticed what he'd earlier been to preoccupied to see- a lyre, leaned up against a vase. "hard to find musicians around here."

The two dancers were drawing glances. Some of those glances shifted to Zahn. –Too many by far.

Zahn took a deep breath. Keep them happy, keep them distracted.

"Maybe I could help..."


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

"Something I should show you, Trask," said Desele, the moment they'd shut the door behind them. The Breton didn't wait for a response. She'd already extracted the parchment from it's place, tucked between a row of jars.

Trask took it, and looked down into a pair of very familiar eyes.

"I was just about to ask." The charcoal likeness stared up at her; not a description, not the kind of thing spread around for the sake of some loosed petty thief or mass murderer. A portrait. Art. Lovingly rendered by the hand of a real artist, and not the rent-a-hand sort employed under Tribunal or Imperial law.

She found a name below the image, written once in Imperial and again in Daedric. Not the name she'd become accustomed to.

"Trask? Is something...?"

Trask looked up into the Breton's wary eyes, and became aware of her own grin, a taut expression tightening every line in her face. She let it go.

"It's nothing. Thank you for sharing this." The woman shrugged.

"You were about to ask," she said, morosely. She hesitated, and added, "And in this case..."

"Yes." said Trask. "This case is unique."

Helviane Desele had never helped her on a job: not once. Desele had a good reason for keeping that poster hidden in a storeroom instead of hanging on the wall outside along with the other notices which her customers occasionally posted there. Habit had taken this one down, and hidden it away. Old habit.

Once, Desele and Trask had agreed to... disagree. But that was history. Had been history, until now.

"So you already knew." Desele leaned back against the shelf, studying Trask intently. "Thought you were out of this business," she said, coolly.

"Not the same business," Trask pointed out.

"No..." Desele admitted, slowly.

One last look at the portrait, and Trask let the parchment fold again. She held it out.

"I only knew the half."

Desele accepted the notice, looking as though she wasn't sure if she'd done the right thing. Like she didn't know what the right thing was. "Figured he might get in trouble. An outlander here- figured. That's all." The cavern, Grief's grin and that featherlight, heavier-than-iron collar. Trouble, yes. Certainly. "So you're taking him back?"

Trask leaned against the wall, and folded her arms. The grin had gone from her face. On reflection, the memory hadn't felt much like amusement anyway.

_ "You won't take me back?"_ he'd asked her.

_Teach you how to not die, cat. I'll teach you how to do that._

But he wasn't going to like it.

* * *

It had been a while, and the instrument was unfamiliar. He messed up at first, trying to remember, trying to adjust. But then his fingers took over, hit the chord he'd meant to find and reminded him how this was easy. Something he could do.

The drummer, middle-aged dunmer with a crooked grin, showed a few teeth. "Not bad." Green-Eyes proffered the drink. Zahn took it, acting on nerves. The overpowering taste drowned his senses and warmed his throat all the way down, like drinking fire. He'd become the center of attention by then.

Stupid. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Stupid... _stupid._

"Are you going to dance?" he asked Caminda, hopefully. Hopefully, because no one with eyes would still be looking at him if she did. For some reason, the dancer laughed and put out a hand to touch his head, right behind an ear. Put a shiver straight down his back, that did.

"If you keep playing," she said, with a wink.

Zahn smiled back.

"Sure." For some reason, he didn't feel quite so concerned anymore. As Caminda turned her back- not a bad view that way, either- his hand reached automatically for the cup which Green-Eyes had given him. Still strong enough to blank his senses, but maybe just a little less unpleasant?  
"Ready?" asked the dunmer with the crooked grin.

Zahn ran a blunted claw across the Lyre's strings, and a cascade of sound followed the motion.

"Whenever you are."

* * *

"By the nine..." Desele's quiet exclamation sounded in Trask's ear as the assassin came to an abrupt stop, hand still resting on the door. The barkeeper put a hand on her shoulder and gently eased past her. All three of the girls were back at their posts. The drummer sat nearby, and beside the drummer sat Zahn. He cradled the lute, fingers moving expertly across the taut strings. The lively melody cut through the roomer, bright and festive. It delighted the drunks, and bemused the few souls who were still sober. A song for a spring festival and a traditional jig. But the dancers knew what to do with it, and where they didn't, they pretended.

It was a good time- a damned good time, the kind this place hadn't seen since the trade ended and the rich visitors stopped coming upriver to barter.

"Boy's got a place," said Desele, turning her round, brown eyes on Trask. "got a night in any tavern he comes to. And a welcome-back going the other way, too."

Trask frowned. Some rovers lived that way. Moved constantly, took any road which lead towards a town and played for their supper from one end of Vvardenfell to the other. Went with the wind, the hunger in their stomachs counterbalanced by the hunger in their souls, that restless addiction to freedom. They came, and they went. Gone for months at a time, and always months removed from being missed. All too often, the drifters vanished. Gone missing between two towns never to reappear. Predators had an eye for that type, knowing very well that they'd rarely be missed.

"Got a place in a ditch," Trask said, shortly. "Got a place like the place I found him."

She curled her hand around the parchment packet in her hand, and made to start towards the unanticipated musician. Desele put a hand on her shoulder.

"Can't stop him now." the barkeepers eyes were no longer widened in shock, but narrowed in shrewd calculation. "I'll have a mess of unhappy customers on my hands. -Let this run it's course."

Trask paused. Too many people watching, too much attention. Certain protestations if she cut the fun short. She sat down at a barstool. Only then did it occur to her how long she'd gone without a drink.

Not on a job. Except she wasn't on a job, not the normal kind, no one was paying her and she didn't even understand her own objectives. To hell with it, then.

"Very well. –I'll have a mug of sujumma while we wait. I'd say he's paid that off by now."

They lasted a while. They would have lasted a while longer, if Green Eyes hadn't been quite so faithful about ensuring that Zahn's cup never ran out. Oddly, as the drummer remarked later, intoxication didn't seem to get into his hands at all. The Khajiit played on in a kind of frenzy, as though his fingers had been hungry for this. Entertainment had been a rare form in recent days, and Desele was canny enough to leave the door open. Sound carried, and so did curiosity. The local competition, an upscale trade-house in the better part of town, ran a thin business that night, with all except the most respectable townspeople stopping by Desele's place for a drink.

Trask had her own bitter draft in a corner, keeping an eye on those around her. Watching them watch him- no animosity, not even in the worst of them. Not even where she'd expected it. Khajiit's couldn't hope to be very popular in the aftermath of Helseth's decree. Without further help from the monarch- and help, Trask guessed, would not be forthcoming- many would fall back into situations as bad, or worse, than what they'd had before. People could care for property. But once free, the khajiit would have no help from anyone. They'd have to find their own feet, and fast.

And speaking of feet, Zahn soon turned out to be particularly unsteady on his own. He'd set the lute aside, careful as anything, and said something to the drummer. The drummer had very little notion what, but he'd been drinking too; so he smiled, and nodded, and watched in mild astonishment as partner stood up, and promptly keeled over.

Trask slid through the crowd and got his arm from one side. Vienna Desele cut in on the other, heaving a regretful sigh even as she lent a hand. "Upstairs, then."

"...Outside." said Zahn none to distinctly.

"Oh? Oh." The barkeep smiled, steered them to the back door, and gracefully detached herself. "I'll just wrap things up inside, then."

Trask gritted her teeth. "Let this run it's course?" she growled. But Desele had already vanished. The assassin dragged the unsteady khajiit to a conveniently thirsty-looking tree.

"Think... drank too much."

"Think you're right."

"Didn't taste good."

"Why'd you drink it then?"

Trask kept her grip, feet braced. Smell of the river, smell of the city, smell of Zahn- none of them particularly nice. But taken together...

"Can't remember."

"Hah!" Trask found herself grinning despite of herself, and the situation, and the thing she'd already decided to do. "You're already getting the hang of it, cat."

* * *

"Upstairs," Desele allowed, and upstairs they went. Threadbare cot, stone floor. Zahn didn't mind. Any horizontal would have worked just fine. But Trask insisted on the cot, and the cot looked better than the floor. Fine, fine... the last thing he remembered was the Assassin taking a cup from the small bedside table. Said drink, said it would help. Green-Eyes had said that too, but Trask insisted and Zahn gave in. The bitter taste washed through him, worse than the brew from before. He got some of it down anyway.

Then, in the second's twilight before he lost consciousness, Trask something. A question.

"Do you know what "Saniel" means, cat?"

The jolt of alarm tore through his mind, one second's fear and lucidity. He tried to struggle free, but he'd already fallen too far. The bitter draft met the alcohol already in his system, and Zahn went out like a guttered candle.

The sounds downstairs soon died away, extinguished like the lights in every window. Trask sat staring outside through the half-drawn shutters, listening to the the cat's steady breaths. The young Khajiit would wake up with a headache worthy of Sheogorath's own handiwork, but by then it wouldn't matter.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

"This it, then?" asked the punter, looking over the bundled form. A body, no mistaking it. Not unless mistaking it involved money, in which case it easily became just about anything else.

A live body. Back-jointed legs saying beast, and a stray bit of mane-hair saying cat. Some slave to be smuggled, perhaps. Or a recaptured runaway who'd found that King Helseth lived very far away, while the Master remained all too near.

Not the first, nor the last. Not so long as he got paid.

The punter laughed, and lashed out with his foot, giving the unconscious khajiit a cheerful kick. The boat rocked, maybe just a fraction more than it should have. Then it steadied, held still in the water by one hand clutching the jetty. The other hand held a knife. And the knife held all of the punter's attention.

"I can handle this boat myself," said a voice, infinitely chillier than the river itself, "So. Don't do that again."

* * *

They met in the docks of Ebonheart. Trask waited for them beneath the ebony dragon's half-furled wing. Taking its mood from every ship in port, the statue seemed restless in the flickering torchlight, ready at any moment to take to the skies and fly towards its imperial home. Few fishing boats rode beside the jetty, and out on the water only one great ship still lay at anchor. To that ship. Trask had sent her messenger. The young Argonian had been surly, awoken hours before the dawn, but a coin and the promise of another had sweetened his mood considerably. He'd left cheerfully, vanishing into the dark water with barely a ripple. Now, out in the bay, Trask could see a torchlit rowboat making it's way towards her.

Beside her, the unconcious Zahn sat propped against the statue's base, a warm pressure against her leg. The boatswain's cloak still rested around his shoulders. The man had taken his pay and gone in surly silence, too intimidated to right what was, in all honesty, simple forgetfulness on her part. Well. That for being a fool, then; and she'd paid the kind of pay one became accustomed to doling out, when the transported goods happened to be unwilling. A high price for a simple job. Let him buy another cloak.

The splash of oars grew louder, and Trask strained to make out the faces of the passengers. Two people, man and woman. The man rowed stoically, while the other sat far front and leaned so far over the bow that it seemed she might fall in.

The woman's face came more into perspective more with every passing second. An oval of a face, regular in feature with large eyes shadowed by a demure black hood. A scalloped shawl hung over her shoulders, also black, and beneath that the dark green of her dress caught the light in ways which common cloth did not.

A lady, thought Trask. But when the rowboat drew level with the jetty, the woman did not behave like one. She scrambled out of the boat and raced towards the statue, shawl flapping like wings in the night.

The torches burning to either side of the plaza added color to pale cheeks, and sparks to dark eyes. Trask did not rise but instead waited impassively as the woman swept towards her and descended in a graceful arch to kneel in front of Zahn.

Gloved hands reached out to lift the bowed head, and Trask watched the woman's expression blossom from strained anticipation to joy and wonder in the space of a breath. Tearful eyes lifted to the assassin's face, and the woman lifted herself from the flagstones in the same motion. She embraced the surprised assassin, a grip indifferent to the other woman's shabby clothes and stiffening spine.

Oblivious to everything except the moment.

"Edeth." the cold voice cut through their connection like a blade severing flesh from flesh. The woman stood up, reminded of her dignity. Trask stood as well. The man stepped up behind his wife, and lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. His shadowed eyes met Trask's, opaque and unreadable.

"It's him," he stated rather than asked, although he hadn't once looked in Zahn's direction. The woman called Edeth said nothing. Possibly, she could not. Her eyes shone like stars.

For a long moment, none of them moved. Then the man held out a hand, and Trask hesitated only a moment before meeting the grip with her own gloved fingers.

"You've done us a good turn, stranger," said the man, his voice as impenetrable as his sunken eyes. "I'd like to speak with you at greater length. Will you accompany us back to our vessel?"

Trask inclined her head courteously, as though the form of a crude self-invitation hadn't been just lying just under her tongue.

"That would be my pleasure."

* * *

The world rocked restlessly, and the air resounded with the creaking of timber, a sound which shot straight through Zahn's aching head.

A wet touch came to his forehead, sending a trickle of water running down his temple and into the pillow behind his head. Felt like a benediction in purgatory. When he opened his eyes, the small kindness immediately cracked under the weight of reality.

All of Zahn's nightmares had one angel in them, and now she sat by the bed with one fine-boned hand clutching the washcloth and her thin face a tearful conduit of loving reproach. She saw his eyes open and swept down to embrace him, long brown hair fanning across his chest, wet rag a chilly touch on the back of his neck.

She said things. Some of them were coherent. How he'd frightened her, how much she'd worried; and questions which she didn't give him a chance to answer. Zahn's mind wheeled across a blank expanse of oblivion, and crashed into the very last thing he remembered.

_ "Do you know what "Saniel" means, cat?"_

"My son," Edeth said, somewhere in that jumble of words, "my beloved sun."

* * *

Trask sat at the table, and met the man's gaze with a steady, insolent stare. He kept his spine rigid and his eyes direct, hostile as a hound challenged by an intruding rat. A military man, from the tip of his receding hairline to the soles of his scuffed boots. A man with no patience for the natives, and marginally less impatience with everyone else. The set of his mouth spoke volumes for his state of mind; pressed shut over gritted teeth. The expression of a man steeling himself for an unpleasant business.

Trask waited. She slouched in the chair, booted feet crossed and arms folded impassively across her stomach. Waiting. Finally he made a move, one which clinked pleasantly and came down on the table with the muted ring of colliding coins.

"The payment." Terse, short words. Not so loud as most military men, but sharp and cold and cutting. It sliced through the air and reached her as clearly as any bull's bellow. Trask inclined her head, and accepted the payment. The coins felt as heavy as an accusation, and she didn't quite take her eyes off of the man across from her. She broke her silence.

"You are... Zahn's father?" The man's face tensed, a ripple of tiny muscles around eyes and mouth and quiver beneath the loose skin of his neck.

"...Twice."

"Pardon?"

"One more job. Twice the pay."

Saxtus set his elbows on the table, and leaned forward, voice resolute. "Two-thousand septims, if you make Saniel disappear for good."


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**:

"...I suppose that answers my question." Trask felt her lips part in the too-familiar parody of a grin, the one she'd worn only a night ago, staring into the eyes of a charcoal portrait. Saxtus smiled, and on him the expression looked harder than granite.

"A stray. An orphan. Nothing of mine."

"Then why the reward? Why delay?"

Still, he smiled. "That was nothing of mine either." He set elbows on the table, fingers steepling. "The lady. My wife." And that was how the pieces fit. A kind, silly woman and this hardened soldier, a man with a reputation and a life back home which would not easily allow for something like Zahn. "I had to make every attempt. Clearly."

And never expected any return, never thought for a moment that the young cat's disappearance wasn't assured from the start.

"Zahn didn't run away," Trask guessed. The man's smile dimmed, drew in at the edges and tightened into something sardonic.

"Does it matter? I've made you an offer. I believe it's fairly straightforward. Make it look like an escape, like something he might manage on his own. A fluke, an accident- I doubt he could manage very much."

Idiot cat. Clumsy cat. Curious and prone to accident. No, not the sort of person who could accomplish according to this man's will.

"And the lady?"

"Muthsera. Twenty years service in Vvardenfell- and now I encounter ethics? Morality?"

A joke, Trask thought. Her kind of joke. Bitter because it came out of truth, and a soul-deep corruption which filtered into every being who came in contact with this cursed island.

The young Nerevine might have cleared the physical blight, but another kind of soul-sickness lingered. She'd drunk it in every bitter draft every time she stopped at a tavern. Heard it on every tongue, watched it on every face.

Vvardenfell was a place for things thrown away, things cursed and things set adrift. Horses couldn't survive, nor could birds. Less tangible things died just the same, things like honesty and decency and innocence.

But Trask had never minded that before. Because Trask hadn't had any of that left to loose.

She met the man's accusation with a derogatory wave of the hand. "Curiosity. Oblige me."

A man who did not oblige anything, or anyone. A man not inclined to start now.

"I do this for my lady's sake," he said, shortly. "She will accept it. Eventually."

Trask's own hands rested loosely on the table. "I never had a mother," she said, her tone detached. "is it so easy, to forget a child?"

Saxtus's jaw tightened, heavy brows lowering like an impending storm. "He is not. Her. Child."

"The ashlanders make no distinction. Even an adopted child is considered flesh of flesh, and blood of blood- after the requisite ceremonies."

"A cultural specialist as well as a philanthropist? But even an Ashlander wouldn't adopt a... a _cat_."

Her word. Had it sounded that way to Zahn, when she said it? Like a reference to some mangy stray, who's life wasn't worth the mess it made while scrounging through rubbish heaps?

"But I've been told that Imperials think differently. Haven't I heard such enlightened things? Words about race being irrelevant, and inconsequential to a person's worth?"

"Worth?" Saxtus laughed, genuinely amused for the first time. "Zahn?" The amusement turned to disgust. "Trouble," he growled, "Nothing except embarrassment from the day Edeth took him in. Useless as a soldier, too stupid to be a scholar. Too thick-blooded even to learn Edeth's magic-tricks- he can barely master a simple healing spell. But, worse than an incompetent, the boy's a coward."

"...A coward?" Trask felt honestly taken aback. She remembered the cavern, and the determination on the boy's face as he cut the emaciated captive's bonds. Remembered the way his eyes had met hers. A coward who could match her stare? She had yet to meet one.

"Even a khajiit can join the legions. But he refuses. Not that he'd survive anyway- I've tried to train him, and he's hopeless." The man had certainly become eloquent. Likely he'd never voiced these complaints before, not out loud. They spilled out of him something from an infected wound finally allowed to break, saturated with a dislike which couldn't be called hate, only because Zahn wasn't worth that.

"If he's hopeless, if he would die anyway, then why throw away his life?"

Saxtus's eyes glinted like steel, and the line of his mouth grew even wider and harder. "A coward's way to think."

"A waste, to throw away something for no reason."

Saxtus shook his head sharply. "Nothing to waste."

An open mind and an insatiable curiosity. A compassion which even Grief hadn't managed to quell. But in the old soldier's mind, those things were too intangible to count. Not the stuff which sons were to be made of, not at all the qualities capable of carrying Saxtus's name, even if Zahn had been his by natural right.

And yet- and yet. Unwilling to loose her love of him, this man waited day after day and week after week, playing himself as the worst kind of hypocrite in order to keep his wife's affection. His hard heart swayed so easily under the influences of the very attributes which he so quickly discounted in Zahn.

"Your wife loves him."

That, at least, struck home. Trask watched in satisfaction as the old man's face paled a shade, but she wasn't rewarded by even the minutest flicker of a flinch. His eyes stayed steady, locked into her own.

"It isn't love," he said, voice harsh. "it's... _fixation_." Saxtus's chair scraped back as he rose to his feet and began to pace back and forth across the carpeted timber.

"I had a son once," he said, shortly, words terse and emotionless. _Had_ a son. _Once._ Proof, if Trask still needed any, that Zahn did not and had not ever counted. "a good boy. Everything..." his voice faltered, broke, and recovered again in steely determination. "Everything a father could want. He died- hunting. Edeth was never the same again. But she was recovering. Slowly, I could see that. I thought, a new post, new scenery, then perhaps... but then she found him."

Saxtus's hand had gone to his forehead, pressing into it. "She relapsed. Insisted that he was our son, somehow, reborn again. Our son!" Saxtus turned, and his fist came down on the table hard enough to make the candle jump and flicker. It cast odd shadows on his face, causing his features to waver and distort along with the light. "She gave him the same name, the same clothes, the same books-"

He stopped speaking, and drew in a shuddering breath, face flushing. Saying these things so easily to a stranger, releasing all the dark, tangled emotions he'd kept caged for far too many years.

"Make him disappear," Saxtus grated, his voice as raw as his emotions. "I'll pay whatever price you ask."

Trask smiled slightly, and pocketed the pouch of coins. "Very well," she said, softly. "I agree." The ship rocked gently, creaked in the stillness, and Trask watched the man's haggard face. A hard man, but beginning to crack under the weight of years spent chained to his own unforgiving mind. "-After tonight, you will never see Saniel again."

_Not unless your gods hear your prayers. Not unless Zahn does._

_ Be assured, I won't. _

* * *

That night, Saxtus exchanged only the stiffest of pleasantries with his guest as the three of them sat at the ship's table. But he had little need to make conversation, because Trask had met his lady. And his lady had quite a lot to say, enough for all three of them.

Edeth blessed Trask, called her many things which Trask was not, and had never been, and would never be. Called her a saint, and a messenger of the nine. Trask ate steadily, but never quite tasted the food.

* * *

Zahn spent four hours poking at the lock on his door, armed with a fork from the dinner Edeth had left him. Now he sat with his back to the swaying ship's timber and tried to restore the utensil to it's previous shape. Because Edeth would see it, and Edeth would know- and that look would be back in her eyes. Not angry or condemning, much worse than that. Hurt.

And the worst part- the very worst part- was that she'd think she knew why.

Zahn worked at the metal, listening to the ship sounds. Water and wood, and not even the ghost of a footstep in the corridor outside. He'd heard nothing of other people since Edeth left, locking the door behind her. Saxtus was out there, somewhere. Every reason to want to stay in here, and every reason why he couldn't.

"Give up, cat?"

Zahn jumped, and the fork went clattering to the floor as he lept to his feet and stared confusedly around the tiny space. It was as though the voice had spoken directly in his ear. He turned at stared at the door, heart pounding in his ears with what was more than simple surprise.

"Trask?"

"Yes." There was a rustle and a tap, as though she'd been sitting against the door's far side and just now changed her position. "I'm here. I've been here- listening. Have you given up?"

Zahn breathed shallowly, trying to account for her presence. "...No." he said, stubbornly. Then, "Let me out. You said you wouldn't bring me back here."

"Said I'd show you how not to die."

"You _also_ said you wouldn't bring me back."

"Cyrodil's a nice place, boy."

Zahn stepped forward and set the flat of his hand against the door, as though if he pressed hard enough the wood might yield and let him through.

"You don't understand." His fingers curled into fists. "I didn't want- I didn't run away! This isn't what you think."

"So tell me what it is."

Silence. Zahn bit his lip, and rested his forehead against the door.

"I can't."

"Saxtus told you to leave. You can start there."

Zahn hesitated. "Why?" he asked finally. "Why should I tell you?" She'd drugged him, kidnapped him, and did exactly what she'd promised not to do, bringing him here, never even asking him why he'd asked her not to. "You could have asked before. You didn't."

"Saxtus told you not to tell."

"You didn't know that! You- I- Why-" He spluttered, and came up short against the calm silence beyond the door. It was bad enough that she'd brought him here, but now she stood between him and escape- or would have done, if he could get the door open. But-

"I'm here now," said the assassin, voice quiet so he had to strain to hear her. "I'm listening now. So talk."

Zahn hesitated, and tried to think clearly. "Will you open the door?"

"Yes."

He set his hand on the doorknob, set his forehead against the wood. "So open it."

"Talk first, cat." So Zahn closed his eyes, took a breath, and talked.

"Saniel's not my name. That first. Edeth had a son named Saniel. He died, and she gave me his name after she adopted me. Said I was his reincarnation.

"I'm not sure what my name was- maybe I didn't have one. My mother was a thief. She killed a dunmer who caught her in the act, and hung for it. I don't remember any of this, I wasn't even two months old. Cook- one of the family servants- told me about it after she got drunk one night.

"I think- I don't know, but I think- Saxtus, he was head of the garrison in Gnisis back then. So maybe he..."

He'd never said it out loud before. The cold, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the shadow in his mind, the thought that haunted him every time his eyes met those of his adoptive mother's husband. And that was the only way he'd ever thought of Saxtus, because Saxtus wasn't, would never, and did not wish to be any sort of a father to the Khajiit.

"Would have happened anyway," he said, quietly. "would have been worse, if the Dunmer's family got to her."

The Dunmer people were typically indifferent to the slave races, except where cruelty became a form of entertainment. But nothing frightened them more than a bestial killer, and nothing enraged them more than fear.

When a member of the slave race turned to killing, especially if that killing involved one of their masters, the return had to be tenfold; an example so brutal that it would cow the children's children of any Khajiit or Argonian who witnessed it. Imperial law might have been a mercy by comparison.

A quick death and a cold meal beforehand. That was Saxtus's mercy.

"Edeth adopted me after. I would have died otherwise." The infant of a criminal, in a world where everyone had too many mouths to feed. In other circumstances the thieves guild or even the Dark Brotherhood might have taken in the orphan, but not while the imperial seal still lay fresh on the writ of execution. He'd of died, unless some slaver decided that he was worth the trouble of raising.

But none of those things had happened to Zahn, instead he'd been taken in by the wife of the man who sentenced his mother to death.

"When Saxtus heard he was going to be recalled to Cyrodil, we talked. He said that I should stay here. That this was home."

A home for lost things, and abandoned things, and things which no one wanted. Edeth, that lady of the oval face and almond eyes, wanted Saniel. But Saniel was the name of a dead boy.

"And you left."

"I... yes."

"And came to Grief. Literally."

Zahn crossed his arms avross his chest, nails digging in as he remembered the tent pitched along the roadside, the wave and the friendly smile. Share a cup, they'd told him. And the rest was a blow to the back of the head and a headache when he woke, deep underground.

"Yes. And you know what happened after. Open the door."

Although he said that, he hadn't acted on his own words, hadn't expected that she actually would. But no sooner had he spoken then the door swung open with the faintest click, metal latch glowing briefly in the aftermath of some unfamiliar spell. So much for his battered dinner fork. Zahn wondered if he had the capability for a spell like that, but he knew, even if he did, Edeth would never have taught it to him.

The assassin stood with a foot on the threshold, standing squarely in the door. "Tell me one more thing, then. What do you want?"

Zahn blinked. A simple thing, a simple question, but one he hadn't thought of for a very long time. Want? Meeting other people's needs, or avoiding them, so far that had been the entirety of his life.

"I- don't know," he said. "I'm not good at anything. I have no skills... except the music." he shrugged. Then said, wistfully, "maybe I could play in taverns. Like last night. Just travel and play."

And end up dead by the roadside, or taken by another like Grief. Not a good way to not die. But maybe a good way to live.

"Saxtus asked me to make you disappear." Trask watched the Khajiit's face. Distress tightened the muscles there, but it was dull, old sort of pain, an ache he was accustomed to. No real surprise.

"-So I have a proposition. Travel with me." _Now_ the surprise.

Trask tapped gloved fingers against her arm, impatient with the faintly lost expression which hovered over the Khajiit's face.

"Soon I will also have to disappear for a time. Vanishing is a complicated process, boy, and I'm more experienced than you."

"Why?" Zahn still stood stock-still, brows drawn togother in an upside-down 'v' over his wide, flat nose. His golden eyes looked a little dazed.

"Because I've done it before."

Zahn shook his head. "No- I mean, why would you—we- travel together?"

"I need a packmule. You need a guard."

Zahn considered that. "You could buy a guar." Trask laughed, and extracted something from her pocket. The object clinked, and when the pouch came into view it looked a good deal fatter than it had back in Ghostgate, when Trask paid for their meager meal.

"A guar can't play the sitar."

She hefted the pouch, then dumped it onto his hand. "Enough for an instrument, I'd think."

Possibly enough for several. Just how much had Saxtus paid her? First for the return, then...

"Yes." Why pretend to think about it?


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

Leon sat straight at the bar, because this wasn't the sort of bar that encouraged anything so comfortable as an elbows-on-the-counter slouch.

As recently as yesterday he'd frequented a place like that, watching, listening, asking questions now and again. But there'd been no sign of her, and no word. More, there had been no word on Grief. No sightings of his late thugs, either, where before they'd moved brazenly through any town they came to, swaggering boldly with weapons on their hips and insults on their tongues. Well-paid and given to revelry, rough but talkative, once provided with the right social lubricants. Gone. Simply vanished.

But She... perhapse she'd died in the cave? A nuisance, if it were true. And also soul-deep relief. Because if she were alive, if she'd caught onto him, if she-

Across the bar, another parton looked up from his drink and looked past Leon's shoulder, to where the door had just opened to admit a shaft of sunlight. Leon turned half around to follow the glance, and his breath caught in his throat. Coming towards him, her hair unbraided, cleaned, and held back from her face by a fine clasp, and with her form complimented by a close-fitting, high-necked shadoweave gown, she was not at all as she had been.

She was instead what he'd expected when he came looking for her, the image of everything she stood for.

He still hadn't recovered by the time she reached him, sliding onto the stool beside his and planting her elbows firmly on the table. -Slouching. Then, and only then, did he believe it.

"Ark." he said. "Tsaria Ark."

"So sure of me?" Trask leaned in close, too close, an ostentatious breach of decorum which caught a dark look from the man beside them.

"I wasn't," Lion acknowledged. He kept his face still, tried to breathe normally, but the smile on her lips said that she saw all, knew all; that she could _hear_ his frantic heartbeat. "Now I am."

"Fine feathers." The assassin's lips quirked. "The greatest tools in an illusionists arsenal require no magic. -And no amount of magic will save a fool who doesn't acknowledge that."

"Your grandfather's words, m'sera."

The smile never wavered, and the eyes grew no colder- they'd been arctic to begin.

"I learn from my predecessors. I learn, also, from their mistakes." She reached out, gloved fingers curling delicately around the stem of his wine glass. She brought the half-full cup to her lips.

A clean glass this time, and quite a fine beverage. Much more befitting to a man who didn't know how to look or act as anything other than he was.

"Grief made a mistake, Lion." the glass came down with a sharp clink, which won a second scowl from their nearest patron. Lion watched the movement, watched the fingers, and thought of poison, of the many varieties and the many, many different painful deaths they might induce.

"I... may have made a moral miscalculation."

Trask shook her head. "Neither of us deal in morality, my friend. Say rather- an intellectual error. I hope it may be your last."

A polite phrase became rather ominous, when the means to making it prophesy lay well within this woman's capability. A dead man could do no wrong.

"I... shall certainly strive for better relations in future."

"Future... yes. Possibly."

Lion clenched his hands into loose fists, willing them not to shake.

"Your brother's orders, m'sera. None of mine." He hated the edge of cowardice in his voice, but he hated the idea of excruciating death much, much more.

"Ah. My dear, sweet, parricidal thug of a brother." She rested her chin on the palm of her hand, staring at nothing. Thinking. Lion could sense the wheels spinning behind that enigmatic face, forming conclusions and deciding his fate. "Such a good, political mind- yes, he'd know who's bed to crawl into. Helseth has no love of the Ark's heritage either. A united front against the Morag Tong would be the least of it."

The Morag Tong, the guild of assassins, the organization which provided balance in a world of corruption and power. No one stood beyond their reach, not even an emperor. Not even Helseth, although he clearly meant to try. And succeed? Trask's gloved fingertips soothed thoughtfully over the polished countertop.

And why should Helseth fight one of the greatest crime syndicates in Vvardenfell, when he could use it, instead? Not as it was now, perhaps, but between them, Ark and Helseth would corrupt the system, break it. Old names would die, new ones would step in. Grief, fallen from favor with the fall of slavery, had been a convenient loss to all sides. A favor to the Camonna Tong crime syndicate, not an injury. And why risk a better neck, with an Ark at hand?

-And the Ark, herself, already marked for death.

"He wouldn't have used me," she said. "He never told you to."

Her brother's sister knew her kin far better than Leon had hoped she would.

"No." Truth did not come readily to Lion, but he'd never, not once in his life, lied to an Ark. Trask's brother had shown him what happened to those who did."That- was my idea."

Trask nodded. "My brother wanted me dead. He and Helseth wanted favor with the Camonna Tong. The Camonna Tong, convienently, had a man who wanted killing." She tapped her fingers on the bar counter, a steady rhythm.

"And what luck- in looking for me, you found out about my grudge against Grief. I imagine it all became very simple after that. An credible excuse, a reward- _your_ reward, I think. The one my brother paid you in advance to kill me."

"I would be glad to-"

"Your ring."

"What?" Lion blinked, looking completely lost.

Trask smiled patiently. "I'll have the ring, as payment for Grief's death." Lion's face must have betrayed him, because the assassin laughed.

"-Not very refined of me? But you learn to think differently here. Practically. You'll learn soon enough." Lion only nodded. He removed the ring, and handed it over without demur. Doubtless such a... 'practical' and well-adapted woman would know where to get its worth.

"Now." The ring vanished.

"Now what?" Lion had been doing well up till now, but his voice shook slightly. She'd said that word with such finality. Their conversation drew to an end. And his life...?

"Now, Leon- a drink to your health." His glass, now containing barely a sip of wine, nudged his numb fingers.

"M'sera." Leon met her gaze, so familiar, like her face. Ark stared at him. What did it matter, which face, brother, or sister? He closed his trembling hand around the glass, pulled it to his lips, and drank. A single drop ran down his quivering chin. Trask caught it, delicately. He watched her carry the drop to her lips, and taste...

His stomach burned. Poison, or self-suggestion?

The assassin stood.

"I am not angry." she lay a coin on the counter, paying for his the way which had had paid for hers, down in the filthy corner-club. A much smaller coin that time, for all she'd drunk nearly twice as much. "I'd always meant to kill him. I was biding my time. You were convenient for me, Leon. Besides..." She leaned her hip against the counter, "I found something interesting."

She leaned down, and spoke directly in his ear. Too close, too intimate. They received irritated stares from around the bar, and especially from the man closest to them.

"Tell my brother I'm dead," she murmured. "I shan't contradict you. As proof-" something rattled down beside the coin. "I look forward to future business, Lion."

And then, in ten short strides, Lion was left alone. Alone, and alive. Lion looked down at the counter, and recognized the ring she'd laid there The ruby was long gone, but he recognized the make. A family crest; a pretty trinket, the like of which every Ark carried. He picked it up, but didn't have time to examine it further before a sudden disturbance sprung up two chairs away. The disapproving patrician reared back, spasming horribly. His glass tumbled to the floor.

A stroke, the physicians would say, later. Unexpected, but not unheard of. An unpleasant experience, not good for an old man's health, but he'd live.

Natural causes. Just a stroke.

* * *

Zahn breathed the smoky subterranean air and let his fingers do whatever they wanted, chasing the sound up and down the sitar's strings and catching them again in bright chords and bird-song strokes. Certainly a fine instrument, much finer than the surroundings. He wondered how the proprietor , a man named Bacola Closcius, had come by something like this. Family heirloom, maybe?

"It's perfect," he told the Bacola, when the merchant stopped by to ask. "How much?"

The man smiled. "A discount if you play a while, Khajiit."

Truthfully, Zahn had already been playing for quite some time. Trask had left him alone, said she needed to settle some business in town. Said it might take an hour or so. But he obliged anyway.

Despite his resolution to grow talons like those of Senche-Raht, he'd filed his grown-out claws to bluntness in order to avoid scratching the sitar's body or damaging the strings.

Saxtus disregarded music. Said it was a luxury, a thing for women to play at when times were easy. But sometimes he still hummed the old legionary tunes under his breath, and not the imperious marches either, but the light-hearted ribaldry that passed for entertainment among fighting men.

And Zahn had also heard, once, from the servant who'd become his caretaker and maid during the times when Edeth couldn't be- heard it from her when she was very drunk- about a young murderess khajiit who faced the gallows with a lullaby on her lips. So maybe music wasn't just there when people had easy lives and nothing better to do. Maybe it meant something.

Zahn lost himself in the sound, and didn't even notice when Trask returned. The elf stood for a time leaned up against up the bar, cradling a full mug and just—watching. Cat had a way about him. It was a tolerant crowd here, Khajiits were regulars in this den, but he could have gotten by in any setting. A quiet type, a listener and not a talker, except with his ready smile and agile hands, which were quick and skillful across the instrument's strings.

The sitar was perfect; she'd finish what Zahn had started in bartering the price down to something fair. And she wouldn't ask where the proprietor had gotten it, either. A family heirloom? Well, yes, [i]somebody's[/i] family heirloom, definately.

Trask finally stepped forward, and waved a little to gain Zahn's attention. Zahn looked, blankly. Then he looked a little a harder. Trask reached up and swept a handful of cropped hair away from her face, behind an ear, and grinned in spite of herself. Her entire head felt too light. The cheap red tunic and guar-hide breaches would take some getting used to as well, after the worn familiarity of her old black coat.

She watched Zahn finally get it.

He'd have to change a bit as well, but not so much. After all, other races tended to have ridiculous amounts of difficulty simply telling one Khajiit from the next.

* * *

A fortnight later, a dunmer highwayman came back to his senses with a unmerciful headache and his nose filled with the stench of his own vomit.

It took his shattered recollections a moment to reform, and when they did his groaned out loud and looked down at his thoroughly ruined wardrobe.

The two had looked easy enough, just a khajiit brat and a short-haired woman, both dressed as commoners and carrying instrument cases. Good money in instruments, good easy money when they went around on the backs of simple-minded bards.

Or so he'd thought. And he'd thought; better him then some truly criminal type who'd kill them for the clothes on their backs, let alone such prizes as they carried in plain view. At least he'd ask politely, and give them the choice of just handing the things over without a blow being exchanged.

Looking out for them, he was- saving their lives.

Or so he'd thought.

Last time he'd ever target a minstrel.

The End

Endnote: A curious bit of trivia.

After the Tribunal fell, the religion was in ruins. But the priests weren't ready to give up quite yet. They turned to the different saints for their salvation, and added a few more to the pantheon to bolster their way of life. Amid the sudden additions is one "St. Arc," a possibly fictitious person who supposedly wanders the roads in the guise of a commoner, but is actually the patron saint of minstrels and musicians everywhere. St. Arc even has her own shrine, set up alongside a Grazeland road just east of Red Mountain.

P.S. Not really. Don't go looking for it.


End file.
